Takeover (32 page)

• precinct organization

• voter ID phone banks

• voter registration drives

• youth effort

• the Election Day process to get out the vote

With their budgets warped toward media spending, candidates and in-state organizations are led to measure the progress of campaigns by dollars raised and tracking polls.

He [the consultant] decides to branch out into lobbying, where his influence enables him to pull down some really fat fees from major corporations, trade associations, and even foreign governments which have major financial interests in the decisions of elected and appointed government officials.
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In Morton Blackwell’s view this situation has led to a general decline in citizen participation as activists and, often, even as voters.

Blackwell believes volunteer participation in elections has been the greatest preparation for competent campaign management, and when campaigns focus on paid media and neglect grassroots organization, the supply of good candidates and new activists dries up.

What’s more, a small group of DC consultants have become a virtually closed guild of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” favor traders who have burrowed into the fabric of the Republican National Committee and the Congressional and Senatorial Committees like parasites.

If you think that assessment is too harsh, consider these facts gleaned from the 2012 election disclosures and an interview
Breitbart
’s Michael Patrick Leahy conducted at C-PAC 2013 with Pat Caddell, the Fox News contributor and Democrat pollster who engineered Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential victory:

When you have the Chief of Staff of the Republican National Committee and the political director of the Romney campaign, and their two companies get $150 million at the end of the campaign for the “fantastic” get-out-the-vote program … some of this borders on RICO [the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] violations. … It’s all self-dealing going on. I think it works on the RICO thing. They’re in the business of lining their pockets.
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“The Republican Party,” Caddell continued, “is in the grips of what I call the CLEC—the consultant, lobbyist, and establishment complex.” Caddell described CLEC as a self-serving, interconnected network of individuals and organizations interested in preserving their own power far more than they’re interested in winning elections.

“Just follow the money,” Caddell told a rapt audience:

It’s all there in the newspaper. The way it works is this—ever since we centralized politics in Washington, the House campaign committee and the Senate campaign committee, they decide who they think should run. You hire these people on the accredited list [they say to candidates] otherwise we won’t give you money. You hire my friend or else.
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Financial corruption is a key component of the current process, according to Caddell. “There’s money passing under the table on both parties. Don’t kid yourself. … If you can’t see racketeering in front of you, God save you.”
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Leahy further documented how Federal Election Commission reports filed by the Republican National Committee show that one-third of the $59.3 million it spent directly with vendors in the last five weeks of the 2012 election was paid to one telemarketing firm, FLS Connect, LLC.

FLS Connect, LLC, was paid $19.6 million by the RNC between October 18, 2012, and November 26, 2012, for tele-marketing services. Republican National Committee chief of staff Jeff Larson cofounded FLS Connect, LLC, in 1999 along with Tony Feather and Tom Synhorst, who now serves as the chairman and managing partner of the DCI Group, a powerful Washington lobbying and public relations firm. Larson was a partner in the firm until November 2010. In February 2011, incoming RNC chairman Reince Priebus named Larson as his chief of staff.

All in all, two consulting firms with close ties to key staffers at the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee
were paid more than $152 million by the three organizations that funded Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign.
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Erick Erickson at
RedState
also did an excellent job of detailing the relationships between the various people and entities involved in just this one scheme to bleed the Republican Party in a column entitled “The Incestuous Bleeding of the Republican Party.”
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Given that politicians are focused on winning elections, the leadership of the Republican Party might overlook these financial shenanigans if these consultants actually won campaigns, but they don’t.

As Erickson put it:

Strip away the candidate and coalition and it is on the fifth floor of 66 Canal Center Plaza (home to a dozen or more interconnected consulting firms, including FLS Connect and Black Rock Group) where the seeds of Mitt Romney’s ruin and the RNC’s get out the vote (GOTV) effort collapsed—bled to death by charlatan consultants making millions off the Party, its donors, and the grassroots.

The fifth floor of 66 Canal Center Plaza reveals a tangled web of incestuous relationships among Republican consultants who have made millions all while the GOP went down the tubes. Here the top party consultants waged war with conservative activists and here they waged war with the Democrats. On both fronts, they raked in millions along the way with a more fractured, minority party in their wake. And they show no signs of recognizing just how much a part of the problem they are.
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But this financial conflict of interest isn’t limited to TV ad placements. During the Bush era, the Republican National Committee developed Voter Vault, a database used to identify and mobilize voters to the polls. It was light-years ahead of anything the Democrats had.

At some point, a partner at FLS Connect, Rich Beeson, went to work at the RNC as political director. Also, the RNC sold its Voter Vault data to FLS Connect and then leased that data back from FLS
Connect. By the end of 2008, activists and others were complaining that the voter vault data was no longer very good.

To most of these highly paid political “strategists,” the campaigns of Ronald Reagan are a grade school memory, and growing up in the rarified atmosphere of Capitol Hill, where most of them got their start in politics, they know only one way of winning—raise a lot of money from special interests and buy a lot of negative ads on TV—and earn themselves millions in ad placement commissions in the process.

And most important, don’t run as a conservative or take any socially conservative positions that might be at odds with those of the urban elites who dominate the mainstream media.

This advice derives from two sources—one grounded in ignorance and the other in greed.

Most of the Washington insiders who make up the Republican establishment have a warped view of history that seems to end on Election Day 1964 and the defeat of the modern conservative movement’s first Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater.

In this warped view of history, a conservative candidate can’t win, because Goldwater lost in a landslide. However, since 1964, when Americans were presented with a clear choice between the conservative Republican agenda, and the liberal Democrat agenda, the voters always chose the conservative agenda.

I have previously quoted my old friend, conservative author and former Reagan official Jeff Bell’s insight: “Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964,” Bell observed. “The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period … When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election … the Republican Party won seven out of 11 [now 12] presidential elections.”

The Democrats who have won since 1968—even Barack Obama in 2008—did not play up social liberalism in their campaigns.

In the past twelve presidential elections, the Republican Party ran seven unabashedly conservative campaigns and won seven times.
Every time we run as moderate establishment insiders—think: 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012—we lose.

The same can be said of congressional elections which saw Republicans as a permanent and powerless minority until Newt Gingrich crafted the Contract with America in 1994 and Tea Party–backed candidates pushed the establishment GOP off the front page and the TV screen in 2010, running on an unabashedly conservative agenda.

While the ignorance and establishment bias of Washington’s Republican insiders is damaging, what is truly destructive is their greed and the conflicts of interest that have become so commonplace among this elite fraternity.

Many of DC’s elite Republican consultants actively oppose the platform of the Republican Party and advocate positions at complete odds with the grassroots voters on issues such as same-sex marriage and amnesty for illegal aliens.

Ever wonder why the outcry against Washington’s crony capitalism that is heard every day on Main Street rarely finds its way into Republican political campaigns?

Simple—the same consultants who run Republican political campaigns also advise and run ad campaigns for special interests who feed off the largesse of the federal budget—and running an advocacy campaign for Wall Street pays a lot better than your average congressional campaign too.

Constitutional conservative candidates do face a dilemma, though, since the consultants with expertise are overwhelmingly from the GOP establishment. Constitutional conservative candidates have said that they’d like to hire consultants who share their beliefs, but cannot find ones with the level of experience and skills of the establishment GOP consultants.

Here is where one of my Four Horsemen of Marketing would certainly apply. There is a huge hole in the market for constitutional conservative campaign consultants. That hole won’t be filled overnight, but conservatives who see this opportunity can “cut
their teeth” in local campaigns, then move to state-level candidates. Under sound free-market principles, the cream will rise to the top, and we’ll end up with consultants who have our principles and the experience to manage campaigns at the federal level.

Until Republicans throw off the influence of these self-serving insiders, and actually run as principled, limited government, constitutional conservatives, they risk suffering the same fate they suffered in 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012, while in the process making millions of dollars for the architects of their defeat.

T
o gain the majority in the United States Senate in 2012, Republicans needed to win a net of four seats in the Senate elections. In the aftermath of the Republican Party’s disastrous conduct of the 2012 campaign, it became an accepted fact among the inside-the-Beltway crowd that “the Tea Party cost Republicans control of the Senate.”

That is pure hogwash, to put it politely.

The Republican establishment has a long history of opposing primary elections in favor of the kind of backroom deals that allow them to field candidates “anointed by the string-pullers inside the Beltway,” as Frisco, Texas, Tea Party organizer Lorie Medina put it, rather than put candidates to the test of a campaign of ideas that requires them to compete with conservatives to earn the Republican nomination for office.

In 2012, the Republican establishment was particularly anxious to manipulate the results of the Republican Senate primaries to avoid what it saw as a dangerous repeat of the nominations of candidates like Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle, two Tea Party–backed candidates who lost in spectacular fashion in 2010.

To that end they pulled out all the stops to make sure that
establishment Republicans, such as Texas lieutenant governor David Dewhurst, Florida congressman Connie Mack III, Wisconsin’s former governor and Bush cabinet official Tommy Thompson, and Virginia’s former Republican governor and senator George Allen, became the Party’s Senate nominees.

They also pumped millions into the campaigns of Republican establishment incumbents, such as Indiana’s six-term incumbent Richard Lugar, who were perceived to be on the bubble and subject to strong primary challenges from Tea Party–backed candidates.

The result of this attempted manipulation was a virtual wipeout of the Republican establishment’s candidates that deprived the GOP of control of the upper house of Congress for the second election in a row.

The three bright spots on the GOP’s 2012 Senate election scorecard: Texas senator Ted Cruz, Arizona senator Jeff Flake, and Nebraska senator Deb Fischer all won their races running as limited-government constitutional conservative Tea Party candidates.

They ran against business as usual in Washington; and even if one senator, specifically Senator Jeff Flake, proved to be a disappointment once he got to the Senate, that doesn’t negate the fact that what elected all three of them to the Senate in 2012 was a promise to pursue the limited government, constitutional conservative values and legislative goals of the Tea Party.

The charge that the Tea Party cost Republicans control of the Senate rests entirely on the implosion of two conservative Senate candidates—Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana.

But Akin and Mourdock were not “outsider,” first-time Tea Party candidates; both were experienced Republican politicians.

Akin was an incumbent Republican member of Congress who had served six terms in the House and emerged from a tough three-way Republican primary to claim the Missouri Republican Senate nomination.

Mourdock was the sitting Indiana State treasurer who ran for office several times before winning a tough statewide campaign to
become Indiana’s chief financial officer. He made a name for himself opposing Obama’s Chrysler bailout for taking extra-legal action that favored the United Auto Workers union over the Indiana State Employees’ Pension Fund. Mourdock defeated incumbent Republican senator Richard Lugar in a hard-fought Republican primary that saw a majority of Indiana’s Republican county chairs oppose Senator Lugar’s renomination.