| First of all, Senor now runs a hedge fund and lives in Manhattan, so he is a rare fellow Wall Street wingut to address the few hundred Wall Street wingnuts of the Monday Meeting as a serious political candidate.
According to the New York magazine article, written by Ryan Lizza, the purpose of the Monday Meeting is to connect conservative Republican candidates from all over the country with conservative Republican Manhattan millionaires.
The meeting was founded by Mallory Factor, a merchant banker who counts among his close friends Grover Norquist and Club for Growth founder Steve Moore. Factor has since moved to South Carolina, because he hates paying taxes, but he still runs the Monday Meeting.
The meeting is not a fund-raiser per se -- invited candidates (of which there are several each month) get five minutes for a speech and five minutes for Q&A. But, unless they bomb, they can expect to raise a lot of money afterwards from the far right of Wall Street.
Factor's crew are mostly fiscal conservatives who hate taxes and regulation, and are not that interested in the "God, guns and gays" channel of GOP wingnuttery.
As Lizza noted:
Factor convinced the Wall Street crowd that helping elect hickish pols with social views many Manhattan conservatives consider Neanderthal was essential. After all, if Christian conservatives could help elect the Republicans who would loosen corporate regulations, why not harness that power? So what if they also want to tinker around with the Constitution on various social issues.
The "hickish pols" got more than the meeting and several big checks out of their trip to the Big Apple.
For Republican guests visiting from out of town, Factor plays cruise director and books a day of activities in the city.
"They try to put together a package," says Steve Moore. "You will have major big-dollar donors in one-on-one meetings. Then a fund-raising lunch where you can raise 50K. Then you might go to the Wall Street Journal editorial board. It's a day of meeting all of the people you need to meet with in New York."
Representative Sue Myrick of North Carolina did the full package tour last year, starting at the Mercantile Exchange, where she rang the opening bell, and moving on to the Journal, the Post, and the National Review before ending up at the Hyatt ballroom for the meeting.
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Best of all: Several members of Factor's crowd wrote checks for her campaign.
Among the national right-wing Republicans who've benefitted from attending Monday Meetings are Jim DeMint, Mark Sanford, and Lindsay Graham of Factor's new home state, Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, Mitt Romney, Norm Coleman, Jim Talent, Jim Bunning, and Mike Crapo.
Back in 2005, Factor bragged that his outfit was 9-for-9 in electing select conservative Republicans to the Senate. His record was certainly worse in the 2006 and 2008 cycles.
The meeting also helps out obscure right-wing Republican candidates in NY -- the next meeting will feature, besides Senor, House (Ann Marie Buerkle in NY-25) and State Senate (Lee Zeldin in SD-3) challengers.
Unlike the out-of-state wingnuts and the in-state nobodies, Senor will be comfortable with the Wall Street wingnut crowd -- he's a hedge fund guy now, married to a semi-celebrity; he'll run as an Obama obstructionist; he'll support Wall Street on taxes and regulation; his views on social issues are unknown, but presumably NY Republican moderate; and his Bush/neocon bona fides are unimpeachable.
All of that will be popular in a hotel banquet room full of rich wingnuts. But it will not be popular at all with NY voters in November, no matter how much Senor raises from his fellow Wall Street wingnuts Monday. |
