Former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman will head a new Super PAC called the Congressional Leadership Fund that will be able to accept unlimited donations from corporations and other private interests.

The Congressional Leadership Fund plans to “counter efforts on the left including the House Majority PAC, unions and the ACORN style groups. This is an independent expenditure fund focused solely and exclusively on maintaining and expanding the Center Right Congressional majority,” according to its website.

Coleman currently heads the American Action Network (AAN), a conservative non-profit that spent at least $18 million for Republican candidates or positions in the last election cycle, according to Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW).

The group’s board includes other members of the American Action Network like former Minnesota U.S. Rep. Vin Weber and AAN President Brian Walsh Politico reports.  Last year, CREW asked the IRS to reconsider the American Action Network’s non-profit status due to its political activity.

The new organization is planning a fundraising event featuring Republican leaders from both houses of Congress on Nov. 2, according to CBS.

A ruling by the Federal Elections Commission this summer allows federal candidates to directly raise funds of up to $5,000 for Super PACs. Democratic congressional leaders have already adopted a Super PAC, the Majority PAC.

Due to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, Super PACs are unburdened can accept unlimited donations. The groups are increasingly influential in the political system, having already spent $2.5 million in this young election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Former Sen. Norm Coleman, chair of a non-profit group that pumped at least $18 million towards conservative candidates or issues in the last election cycle, is joining Mitt Romney’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination as a special advisor, Romney’s campaign said Wednesday.

“His advice will be critical as I lay out my vision for improving our economy at home and strengthening our partnerships around the world,” a statement on Romney’s campaign website read.

Coleman said Romney is the right candidate for this “important moment in our nation’s history.”

“Whether it is turning around our struggling economy or maintaining our relationships with international allies, the next President must have the experience and leadership to keep America strong at home and abroad,” Coleman said. “Electing someone who has not been tested by the fire of experience results in failure. The last three years have proven that.”

Coleman, who is a member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said that Romney had the best position on Israel of any Republican candidate.

Coleman served as Minnesota U.S. Senator from 2003-2009. He failed in a bid against Sen. Al Franken in the 2008 election.

Coleman currently serves as chairman of the American Action Network (AAN), a conservative non-profit that spent at least $18 million in support of Republican candidates or positions in the 2010 election cycle, according to campaign finance records compiled by Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW). Former Minnesota U.S. Rep. Vin Weber also sits on the board of the group, and has also endorsed Romney.

Coleman’s organization has attracted criticism for its use of a non-profit status that doesn’t require the group to disclose donors. CREW, a watchdog group, wrote a letter to the IRS asking them to reconsider the American Action Network’s non-profit status because of its political activity.

In August, the AAN spent about $1 million sending out ads and mailers on Medicare that Factcheck.org found were misleading. In 2012, the National Journal reports the group expects to spend in the “high tens of millions.”

Considering that former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty vowed to continue his 2012 presidential campaign regardless of the results of the Iowa Straw Poll, it was a bit of a surprise when he called it quits the day after he finished third place.

But the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reports that money may have been the deciding factor in his decision to drop out of the race. Anonymous Republicans told Stein that the campaign may be in debt up to $500,000, although other sources said that figure was exaggerated.

Other former Pawlenty supporters confirmed that there was a financial motive to Pawlenty’s withdrawal from the race.

“If there was any mistake, we should have not put as much emphasis on the Iowa straw poll and had a plan that would have carried us through to January, but that became financially impossible,” former congressman and Pawlenty backer Vin Weber told MinnPost‘s Devin Henry in an interview published Monday. Weber is now supporting former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

The Pawlenty campaign doesn’t need to disclose how much it spent in the last few months until Oct. 15, but by July, the campaign managed to raise almost $4.5 million, according to records from the Federal Election Commission. In the three months covered by the July quarterly disclosure filing (a period ending on June 30), Pawlenty spent about $2.5 million, leaving $2 million in the bank.

Pawlenty has yet to endorse another candidate.

Some of Tim Pawlenty’s former Iowa supporters have found a home with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

Iowa Rep. Linda Miller of Bettendorf and  Dallas County Recorder Chad Airhart of Waukee have both joined Romney’s leadership team, according to the Iowa Independent.

“Mitt Romney is the candidate we need to put this country back on the right track,” said Miller. “As governor, he balanced the budget and created jobs without raising taxes. He knows what is needed to get the economy moving again and has the private sector and government experience to do just that.”

Pawlenty dropped out of the race following a dismal showing in the Iowa Straw Poll on Aug. 13. Iowapolitics.com reported that some Pawlenty’s supporters were being pursued by other campaigns within a day of his withdrawal from the race.

Pawlenty repeatedly used Romney’s support for Massachusetts healthcare reform as a punchline during the campaign, calling it “Obamney-care,” although he declined to repeat the charge in a face-to-face June debate.

The Star Tribune reported that former U.S. Rep. Vin Weber of Minnesota has also thrown his weight behind Romney, perhaps giving Romney some sway over Minnesota Republicans, who overwhelmingly supported Pawlenty financially over other candidates, according to Federal Election Commission records.

As part of it’s “Elephant in the Room” series, Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network did a half-hour long segment on Gov. Tim Pawlenty and his presidential aspirations. CBN’s David Brody sat down with Pawlenty and wife Mary as well the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza and Politico’s Jonathan Martin. Among the topics were Pawlenty’s connection to the evangelical community and his lack of name recognition.

Pawlenty said he’s running on a platform of repealing health care reform: “I think it’s one of the worst piece of legislation in the history of the country.”

He also talked about his faith. “If the nation turns its back on God or tries to push him out of the equation, we are going be a much poorer nation for it,” he said. “We believe in Jesus Christ. We believe what Jesus taught — not only believe in but try our very best to follow. Jesus is who he says he is, and it’s both simple but also profound.”

The Pawlentys were asked about their church whose pastor is also the president of the National Association of Evangelicals and whether that connection could help with his presidential bid.

“I can’t imagine that Leith Anderson or I would think that that’s an issue,” Mary Pawlenty said. “Our faith obviously is a part of who we are, and to the extent individuals as they hear that find they are interested learning more about who my husband is. The notion that there’s somehow access, that doesn’t even compute in my brain that way.”

Gov. Pawlenty responded, “Pastor Anderson is not someone who would or should use that for political purposes, and he’s a wonderful person and a dear leader and minster. Neither he nor that group is some sort of plug-and-play political operation. He’s in the business of saving souls. He’s not in the business of political campaigns.

CBN also polled people on the streets of Washington, D.C., to see if they recognized Pawlenty. None of the ten people on the street easily recognized Pawlenty — only one did after incorrectly guessing that he was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Minnesota Republican strategist Vin Weber made the case for Pawlenty as well saying he’s the only conservative governor in Minnesota for the last 50 years.

The full half-hour interview can be viewed below:

Randy Demmer, via Facebook

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s loss is Randy Demmer’s gain. The Sixth District Republican lost a key fundraising staffer last week in an office shakeup that also saw the departure of her chief of staff. But that staffer, Bachmann finance director Zandra Walcott, is heading straight to the Demmer campaign to help in his bid to unseat DFL Rep. Tim Walz in Minnesota’s First Congressional District.

While Demmer raised just $80,000 less than Walz, the incumbent Democrat has a sizable cash-on-hand total that will be tough for Demmer to surpass.

Walcott, however, leaves the Bachmann campaign after a second quarter haul of $1.7 million.

A press release from the Demmer campaign also notes that Republican strategist Vin Weber has joined the campaign as chairman.

“Nobody understands Southern Minnesota better than Vin Weber,” said Demmer. “I am proud to have him serve as my campaign chair and help guide us through to victory in this fall’s election.”

Photo: WDCpix

Will Norm Coleman run for governor? Politico says “a decision could well come before the end of the year,” based on what his friends are saying. One pal puts the likelihood of Coleman reprising his 1998 guv bid at 55 percent.

Most of Politico’s sources go nameless. One who doesn’t, former U.S. Rep. Vin Weber, says Coleman has moved from “No” to a question mark on the idea.

Without even having thrown in his hat, Coleman leads all potential GOP successors to Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who has decided not to run for re-election next year. A recent poll had Coleman at 46 percent of likely Republican voters. Next: state Rep. Marty Seifert, with 16 percent.

After conceding re-election defeat to Al Franken last summer, the former senator first said he’d decide soon, then put off until next spring a decision on running for governor.

Pawlenty is expected to offer ideas for expanding the party’s base and tell his life story, from growing up in South St. Paul with a truck-driving dad, to maintaining his own hard-driving no-tax stance as governor at a State Capitol now dominated by Democrats.

Pawlenty just returned from Iraq and is already set to speak at a gathering of Republican governors next month. A travel schedule that started getting heavy when he was in the running as a vice presidential pick last summer never really let up and seems to be accelerating again since his announcement that he won’t seek a third term.

That led to widespread speculation that he’ll make a bid for his party’s presidential nomination in 2012.

“I think he’s clearly doing the things he ought to do to put himself in position if that’s what he wants to do,” says lobbyist and former U.S. Rep. Vin Weber.

I proudly stand in support of Senator Norm Coleman’s pursuit to see that Minnesota’s voters are enfranchised by having their ballots counted. If voters do not have confidence in elections, then they will not have confidence in their elected leaders. That is why the judges’ review of thousands of additional ballots in Minnesota is critical to the democratic process. The Republican National Committee remains committed to Norm Coleman’s campaign and confident that when the recount contest is complete, he will be re-elected to the U.S. Senate.

And here are some excerpts from Politico’s report on Coleman’s finances:

Coleman’s efforts to make ends meet on a public servant’s salary were a persistent theme throughout his 2008 reelection campaign — and burned him politically time and again. …

Under the right circumstances, that argument might have provided Coleman with a populist edge and, indeed, during his reelection campaign last year, Coleman argued he was more in tune with working Minnesotans than his highly polarizing Democratic opponent, former comedian Al Franken. …

But the steady drip of stories about Coleman’s own finances, many of them appearing at the most inopportune times, may have had a more lasting impact on the race than the short burst of negative publicity that accompanied Franken’s admission [of failure to properly pay taxes]. …

“I’m not quite sure why, but there’s been a lot more scrutiny of Norm’s finances than any other politician I can think of in Minnesota. At least more than any other politician who hasn’t done anything wrong — or at least, we don’t think he’s done anything wrong,” said Coleman friend Vin Weber, himself a former Minnesota congressman. …

According to an analysis of members’ personal financial statements by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, at least 26 members of the Senate were less wealthy than Coleman in 2007.

Weber is the best I know at promoting his (Republican) side and his (conservative) cause without denying the obvious or making those who disagree with him feel that he is insulting their intelligence.

An early and ardent supporter of the Iraq War, Weber’s presentation of even that awkward topic combined qualities of candor with at least the best defense of what President Bush has done, and the possibility that it won’t sink the Republican ticket this year, as you can imagine. I’ll give chapter and verse on that below. But first, his overview of the Republican presidential field at this moment in the contest:Weber started by, as he said, “acknowledging the obvious,” that according to the current polling, the Republicans have given back over the last three years all of the gains they had made since 1978 — gains that had enabled them to win five of the last seven presidential elections. Having pulled to parity in party identification, the GOP now trails the Democrats by 12 points. The Dem advantage is bigger among younger voters.

The Republicans are no longer the party that most Americans trust on issues of national security or prosperity/economic security.

Front loading of caucus and primary schedules has backfired

If the states that moved up their primaries and caucuses thought they were going to increase their impact and force the presidential candidates to spend time and money there, they have brought about almost the opposite effect.

With 20 states (including New York and California) holding primaries or caucuses on Feb. 5 (and the Dems have 22 day), the nominations have an excellent chance of being decided that night.

But since none of the candidates has the resources to compete in that many widely scattered state races, the candidates are focusing even more of their time and money on Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, believing a strong showing in those traditional early contests is the best way to do well on the superest of Super Tuesdays.

Mitt Romney (Weber is a high-ranking Romney advisor) has built his early strategy around the traditional one-two punch in Iowa and New Hampshire. His problem is that his big lead in Iowa has disappeared. In a hallway conversation with me, Weber acknowledged that Romney hasn’t come across well in the recent debates, and appears to be on the defensive.

Rudy Giuliani‘s best states (like New York) are in the Super Tuesday lineup, and Giuliani had originally hoped to avoid seriously competing in the early states, but he has now realized that if you start 0-for-4, you head into Super Tuesday looking like a loser. So he’s now changed his strategy and trying to gin up a decent showing in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Mike Huckabee, the dark horse of the year so far, has a strategy based on pulling a big come-from-behind win in Iowa. Weber acknowledged that “there’s every possibility he could win in Iowa,” which would be a big blow to Weber’s guy Romney. But Huckabee has little organization or natural appeal in New Hampshire and little money in which to run in the big Super Tuesday states. So Weber doesn’t see an easy way for Huckabee to build on his Iowa surge,

John McCain (whom Weber backed in 2000) started out thinking he could run a national campaign as the natural frontrunner, but has found out otherwise and is now betting everything on New Hampshire. He will drop out soon after New Hampshire if he doesn’t win there.

Fred Thompson is betting the farm on South Carolina. But Weber says Thompson isn’t strong “anywhere north of Nashville,” and Weber has never understood what made Thompson think he had a chance for the nomination.

The problems of neo-Reaganism in 2008

Thompson is supposedly the most Reagan-like of the candidates, and Republicans still believe in the Reagan magic. But Weber said that Reaganism “is not something you can just pick up the way it was invented in 1980 and say the same lines all over again.” Weber took apart the three strands of American conservatism — economic, social and national security — that Reagan wove together into a winning coalition, and explained the current Republican challenges with each of them.

On Reagan-style economic conservatism, Weber said the problem was that 40 percent of U.S. households don’t pay any income taxes. It’s hard to construct a tax-cutting message that has widespread popular appeal, Weber said. He mentioned that Huckabee is promoting the so-called “Fair Tax,” which does away with income taxes entirely. But  Weber seems to think that idea is pretty crazy and most people figure this out when they learn that the income tax would be replaced with a 23-30 percent sales tax on everything they buy.

On social conservatism, Weber said he was nervous about Republicans who, as they contemplate the possibility of nominating a pro-choice candidate like Giuliani, say that the social conservatives will have to stick with the Repubs because they have nowhere else to go. Weber said evangelical Christians used to be Democrats.  They became Republicans almost entirely because of the abortion issue. If they decide the party has broken faith with them on that issue, they are not necessarily economic or national security conservatives. Right now they are excited about Huckabee, a Baptist preacher who speaks their language and has been steadfast on the social issues.

“My view is that Mike Huckabee can’t win the Republican nomination,” Weber said, “but Republicans can’t win without those voters.” If Huckabee loses in a way that makes social conservatives feel ignored, disrespected or abandoned, it could be a major blow to the Republican ticket, he said.

Iraq

But the “motherlode” of Republican support over recent years has been the widely held view that Republicans could be trusted to protect the country while the 1972 McGovern candidacy turned the Dems into a party that the public perceived as dangerously weak on military issues, Weber said.

The Iraq War has cost the Republicans that reputation, Weber said. That’s the kind of acknowledgment of painful (but indisputable) truths I referred to at the top that wins Weber points with me for credibility. And he went further during a Q and A with political scientist Larry Jacobs after the talk.

The level of violence in Iraq is down, and is starting to show up in polls, with more Americans saying the war is going well. But Weber said: “I don’t think Republicans should take much solace from the improved polling.”

The poll numbers haven’t improved on the question: Was the war a mistake? Weber’s interpretation: “The country has decided that it wasn’t worth it. They’re saying: ‘Yes, it’s better to win than to lose. But it would have been better not to have done it at all.’”

The only hopeful sign for his party on that score, Weber said, is that the salience of the war as a voting issue seems to be declining. He didn’t say this, but implied that if the 2008 election is basically a referendum on the Iraq War, the Repubs will lose.

But, having presented the Iraq War as a political problem for his party, Weber said two other things that amounted to a half-defense of the war, and a half-prediction that it doesn’t have to sink the Repubs in 2008.

The half-defense was this:

When Jacobs asked him directly whether the war had been a mistake, Weber said that it turned out to be a mistake to topple Saddam Hussein when the Bush administration did it.

If Bush had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction (Weber clearly implied that Bush believed the weapons were there, and wasn’t challenged on that point), it would have been wiser to wait to topple Saddam until U.S. troops were no longer tied down in Afghanistan.

BUT, he noted that Bill Clinton had endorsed regime change in Iraq as a U.S. goal, and that Madeleine Albright had compared Saddam with Hitler. Weber asserted that the sanctions regime that had restrained Saddam over the previous decade was unraveling. Weber said that even the Dulfer Report, the final definitive post-invasion statement of the U.S. government on the absence of WMD in Iraq, had concluded that the acquisition of nuclear weapons remained a priority for Saddam.

The half-prediction was this: The Iraq issue doesn’t have to be a big factor in the election if voters can see through the hype and realize that the concrete differences between mainstream Democratic and Republican position on Iraq are not that big.

The Bush administration is planning to start reducing U.S. troops strength in the spring of 2008 (if only, Weber acknowledged, because the current troops levels can’t be sustained). Top Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are talking about a schedule of 16 months or more to withdraw combat troops. Neither Clinton, Obama nor John Edwards would guarantee to have all U.S. troops out of Iraq during the next presidential term. The Democratic position “is not hugely different from what Bush is saying,” Weber said.

Is this clever spin, wishful thinking or a partial truth? My gut feeling is that it has elements of all three.