Progress Illinois

Congressman-elect Aaron Schock isn’t asking for much this holiday season. After ousting Democrat Colleen Callahan by a healthy 20-point margin in the 18th congressional district race, the 27-year-old Republican sent a letter to supporters on November 21 requesting for a bit of assistance to pay down his campaign debt. Here’s an excerpt from his plea (PDF), courtesy of the State Journal-Register’s Bernard Schoenburg:

The decision I had to make was to risk losing this seat from a carefully coordinated and perfectly timed attack coordinated by a biased journalist and insiduous, non-stop attacks by my opponent, or stand up to them by matching their burst of extra late campaign ad spending to hold our own in a campaign where so many volunteers and contributors had sacrificed enormously for 15 months to elect me to succeed Ray LaHood in serving you in Congress. [...]

I had to go against every fiber of my being in going out on a limb financially by $80,000 to keep from being overwhelmed by these coordinated attacks on top of the Obama tsunami.

What’s screwy about this appeal (besides the abundance of run-on sentences)? For one, Schock outspent his Democratic rival by over $1.5 million. Sure, the DCCC added Callahan to its list of Emerging Races in June, but for Schock to suggest that he was under siege by Callahan or the national party is a joke.

So is the timeline Schock sketches for his supporters. As the congressman-elect tells it, he resisted the urge to put his own skin in the game until his opponent’s relentless attacks at the tail end of the campaign forced his hand. But FEC disclosure records tell a different story. Schock dropped $50,000 into his own campaign fund in September of last year, well before the general election race even got underway. Going against every fiber of your being, Aaron? Hardly.

Equally interesting is Schock’s desire to recoup $80,000 of his own dollars. The $50,000 he spent last September was his only personal contribution. He didn’t donate any money to his leadership PAC, either. Where the extra $30,000 comes from is unclear.

UPDATE: One possibility is that Schock isn't referring to an $80,000 personal contribution (though the language he uses certainly suggests that), but rather $80,000 in last-minute spending that exceeded the campaign's cash-on-hand.  That seems unlikely, however, as the "pre-general" report he filed with the FEC -- which includes receipts up to October 28 -- showed him with $266,000 cash-on-hand.  And none of the supplementary filings issued by Schock's campaign between that date and November 4 show a loan.  Is it possible Schock spent that $266,000 plus an extra $80,000 in the six days prior to the election?  I suppose.  But there's no paper trail to prove it at the moment.