Sarah Palin must be over the target.

In what appears to be a coordinated attack,

• Mediaite: Sarah Palin Bizarrely, Wrongly Takes Credit for Marco Rubio
• Political Gates:  SarahPAC – Effective PAC or Sarah Palin’s Personal Slush Fund?
  This one is kind of incoherent.
• Daily Beast:  Palin’s SarahPAC Embarrassment: Consultants Are Cashing In

Self-described conservative AJ Delgado highlights 14 frames (by my count), less than a second, of Rubio’s family in a 2 minute, 18 second ad, drawing from that something “bizarre”.

The Shark Tank reminds us all of how it went down.

In April of 2010, Rubio was gaining considerable name recognition, but it wasn’t until a video that the Shark Tank recorded of Sarah Palin at the 2010 Southern Republican Leadership Convention in New Orleans, did Rubio’s national name ID  really blow up.

In the video, Palin stated,” I love Marco Rubio.” She later added,” Marco, keep up the good work-call me, can I help?”

John “No Labels” Avlon  attacked SarahPAC over its expenditures, humorously faulting Palin for spending (marginally) more than she took in — as if 2012 were just like any other year. The main point of the attack was to label Palin a hypocrite for SarahPAC’s use of consultants.

The video riffed off her speech at CPAC, in which Palin railed against “the big consultants, the big money men, and the big bad media.” But there’s an irony alert ahead: the current stated purpose of SarahPAC is to raise money ahead of the 2014 election—most of which will be spent on conservative consultants.

But as Ali Akbar points out, a “campaign consultant” is essentially anyone who works on a campaign. Here’s a taste; read the whole thing.

What Palin is going after is specific elite category of the consultant class: Those who reap millions of dollars for controlling votes, for building candidates, for brokering bad deals, for finding awful consensus instead of fighting for victory.

A culture has been brewing in DC since the 1980s. The establishment has always existed, but the systematic and structural powers of “The Establishment” have increased within the upper tiers of Republican mega-consultants. Well, that was until the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. Palin’s war is with the consultant class, not all consultants. It’s the difference between a de facto institution and a description. Between a noun and an adjective. This is all pretty basic stuff, unless you’re pushing straw men arguments for a living.

From OpenSecrets.org, below is a list of expenditures for the PAC last year.  This is not the Michael Steele RNC. A group living the high life from donor money would spend more than $4000 for meals in a year. It looks like SarahPAC uses a lot of direct mail, using a well-known conservative vendor.  Note that the only category that resembles labor in the list are the entries for consultants.

Media consultants are often given a fee that includes their subcontracting cost of the various media buys. It’s more efficient, and hides the details of ad buys, for instance, in local markets.

Top Vendors/Recipients