Archive for the 'Operatives' category

Bashing Bush, Matt Latimer, and Peggy Noonan

Sep 17 2009 Published by under Books, Operatives, Politics, Self-Promotion

So another “Bush bashing” book is out (at least in excerpt) and the Bushie loyalists are again charging the airwaves and the Internet to defend GWB. Just as we saw with Scott McClellan, they’ll define Latimer as a doofus, out of the loop, in over his head, not as important as he thinks. (Which, of course, begs the question why the Administration excelled at hiring the incompetent and the self-important. Didn’t they have a screening process?)

I have read the excerpts of Latimer’s book and frankly don’t find all that much wrong with it. I’ll likely buy the book and consume it all simply because I liked the way the excerpts were written. His publisher is right. He has an engaging style. Was he in the room or across the street at the EEOB? Who cares. He was clearly closer to the President than 99.9% of Americans will ever get in their life, so let him have his say. We might find it interesting.

The treatment Latimer has received in the last 36 hours, however, has left me perplexed. It reminded me a lot of McClellan’s welcoming reception and that reminded me of something Peggy Noonan wrote.

William Safire, himself a memoirist of the Nixon years, said to me, a future memoirist of the Reagan years: “The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony.” History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. “I was there, this is what I saw.” History will sift through, consider and try in its own way to produce something approximating truth.In that sense one should always say of memoirs of those who hold or have held power: More, please.

Noonan, and by extension Safire, were spot on. I think that every White House staffer should not be discouraged, but rather should be required to write a book, and tell the story of their time there. Our history demands that those making it (whether the President or his secretary) should provide us with as much detail as possible. When these books are written we should not denounce the writer, we should simply ask for the next installment from the guy who sat next to Latimer so we could see how he remembered the events.

One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had was with the woman who sat next to Monica Lewinsky in the White House. She once gave me her take on the woman behind the blue dress and it meant more to me than any ABC News special report.

Do I buy the caricature of Latimer as an opportunist trying to parlay his brush with fame into a financial windfall? Absolutely. Do I also believe that much of what he says is probably exactly as he remembers it? Absolutely.

That’s why we need more of these books, not less. We need to be able to compare notes and make our own determination about what happened, who these people were, where they made mistakes and where they proved they were only human.

Now, the latest to weigh in against Latimer in protecting the Bush years is James Carville.

This little dweeb needs to be glove slapped… People that have the honor of working in the White House ought not be going out and publishing this…

I couldn’t disagree with Carville more.

The people that need to be glove slapped are Carville and his ilk for attempting to silence future tomes. If Dana Perino, Tony Fratto, or Ed Gillespie recall events differently, let them write a book and give us their take. By the time all the ink dries, we might have a semi-complete picture of life inside the GWB administration.

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To Be Clear About McClellan…

May 29 2008 Published by under Government, Operatives, Political Parties, Politics, Republicans, The President

First, I have to give HuffPo credit. I exchanged e-mail with Sam Stein shortly before walking out the door to lunch, and before I had finished my brisket at Capitol Q (just six blocks from my office) my e-mail started buzzing with questions/comments about this post. They work fast.

As for the content, let me expand on what I told Sam.

I have no idea what Scott did or did not experience in the White House and have no way of knowing whether his specific accusations are true or false.

My point to Sam, and the point to my Twitter comment last night, was that Scott has written a book about the nastiness of politics in general and the notion of the permanent campaign specifically, that is right on the money. The excerpts I have read of the book make a very salient and very meaningful point – this town and the culture of constant political battle, do great harm to the process of actually governing.

When you are unwilling to admit a mistake for fear of creating an opening your opposition can exploit for partisan gain, you create a cycle where bad choices become compounded upon one another. I think that is a syndrome that we saw emerge from the Clinton years and grow worse during the Bush years. There is simply no room for honest discussion anymore. There is merely partisan scorekeeping and score settling.

I also believe, as Matthew Dowd noted in the New York Times, that Bush has squandered the second term that 62 million people gave him.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

Believe it or not, there are more than a handful of people who work in politics and become involved because they fundamentally believe that we can change the world we live in. Matt referred to the idea in his NYT interview.

“I’m a big believer that in part what we’re called to do — to me, by God; other people call it karma — is to restore balance when things didn’t turn out the way they should have,” Mr. Dowd said. “Just being quiet is not an option when I was so publicly advocating an election.”

I think McClellan’s interview on Today this morning echoed much of that same sentiment. These are people who worked tirelessly to elect a President in which they saw so much more than what was to come. McClellan says they got caught up playing the Washington game. I believe that is true, and I believe almost everyone recognizes that is true.

As I told Sam, I think McClellan’s book should be viewed through that prism. The media and the Administration may portray this as a gotcha perpetrated by Scott, but I think that discounts the larger message. It is that message that I agree with. For that reason, I fear the typical Washington response to discredit the messenger will force us to lose sight of the message.

I am a believer. I think people can change their world by getting involved. Unfortunately, this town tests my faith in that idea every day. Watching Scott being savaged for fighting for that ideal is testing it again today.

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More Chatter About @Sorendayton

Mar 20 2008 Published by under Craziness, Elections, Free Speech, John McCain, Operatives, Pandering, Politics, Technology, The Internet

Matt Lewis has a good post up at Townhall on the Soren Dayton flap. He takes McCain to task for his overreaction (which is fair). He also takes McCain to task for imposing limits on political combat.

Still, reprimanding him may cause future McCain operatives to think twice before doing their job. Is McCain recommending a sort of “limited war” in which the enemy can shoot at us, but we can’t shoot back?

Standing on principle is a good value, but so is supporting your subordinates and so is loyalty. It takes political courage to stand up for your team — even if it may cost you politically. Is McCain too concerned about wanting to come across as a nice guy?

The bigger point, and one I think that’s been lost in this, is that Soren was using his personal accounts in a personal communication. Unlike the Amanda Marcotte dust up, Soren was not hired as a spokesperson for the campaign and simultaneously promoting himself and his personal ideological agenda.

He didn’t use a campaign e-mail address to send the link to the video. He didn’t even use a McCain sponsored twitter account. He used his own personal accounts to share a thought with people he felt were friends about online politics – a field he happens to have both expertise in and familiarity with.

This was not like the Samantha Power incident where an adviser (albeit an unpaid one) was speaking with a reporter. This isn’t closer to the cases of Linda Olsen and Judy Rose who were fired for forwarding the “Obama is a Muslim” e-mail. While it was never clear to me whether the women in that case used official campaign addresses or their personal accounts, the material they sent was untrue and potentially slanderous.

Soren’s incident has none of that. The material in the video was predominantly Obama, his wife, and his pastor. Granted the video contains footage of Olympic athletes and Malcolm X that it should not have. The statements of Michelle Obama and Jeremiah Wright are more damaging without all that.

But again, Soren did not create the video. The message was not sent from the campaign systems. It was a personal note. He was not a spokesman, he was a private citizen working on a public campaign and using a personal address.

One thing about this incident sends a chill down my spine. Many people are afraid to run for public office because they fear the rectal probe that is our electoral process. They fear the media scrutiny and the potential that some past indiscretion – no matter how small – will make them a public spectacle.

Do political operatives now have to fear that their private communication will become tomorrow’s news story? Do the people that give selflessly in political campaigns have to dread every workday wondering if they will be the campaign’s latest black eye?

How many e-mails did you send today that, taken out of context and publicized on the news, could be an embarrassment to you or your employer? How many of your personal notes contain jokes about the office, your company’s competitors or some other matter best kept private?

If we have rewritten the political rules so every piece of personal communication sent by campaign staff is now fodder for political advantage, we will further degrade our political process.

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For Ds and Rs: A Proposed Truce

Feb 29 2008 Published by under Democrats, Miscellany, Operatives, Politics, Republicans

A tweet from Mike Krempasky a short while ago asks:

Seriously. How can reasonable adults STILL toss “Nazi!” insults around in casual discourse as if it doesn’t diminish real horror?

It got me thinking about an e-mail I received from Micah Sifry once. In a post I wrote for TechPresident, I had included a reference to the Democrat Party. He wrote asking why we Republicans insist on dropping the “ic” from the end of the word. He suggested it was juvenile.

I agree. I think it’s totally juvenile, but it’s something Republican operatives are taught early in their political career and it sticks with you.

Between Mike’s tweet and Micah’s old e-mail, I came to a conclusion. We need to agree to a truce. Thus, I propose the following.

We, the Republican Party pledge to never again drop the “ic” from Democratic when referencing your party. In exchange, you, the Democratic Party, will acknowledge the real and legitimate offense inherit in comparing political rivals to a regime that tortured, starved, and killed 6 million people.

Political differences are legitimate and reflect divergent viewpoints on world events. Discussion of issues and participants in political debate should not be punctuated with juvenile remarks or insults that diminish the horror inflicted on millions by the Nazis.

Refering to Republicans as fascists and Democrats as dirty hippies is still perfectly acceptable.

I think it’s a fair compromise and takes a small bit of childishness out of politics. Do we have an accord?

P.S. Follow me on Twitter (and let me know to follow you)

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Fred08.com: An Outside Insider’s View

Jan 24 2008 Published by under Bloggers, Candidates, Elections, News Media, Operatives, Politics, Republicans, The Internet

(cross-posted from TechPresident)

A lot has been written about the Thompson campaign in the past two days. I have read a bunch of post-mortems all focused on what went wrong, but I thought I would spend a little time telling you what went right. For people interested in online politics and the way candidates use the web, the Thompson campaign is a great case study in what can go well, and go badly in our world.

On May 22nd, I was sitting at Inova Fairfax hospital as my wife was rehydrated. A vicious stomach flu was circulating through the house and had brought my wife and son down. As we sat there that evening, I received an e-mail on my Blackberry from the brother of a friend of the Thompson’s. A few days earlier, they had seen an article in the Washington Post wherein I chastised my party for not using the Internet effectively.

I had been sweating the fallout from that article for two days. I was not exactly loved by the RNC for my critical assessment of their online operation. That article, which was about 180 degrees removed from the series of conversations I had with the reporter, was not going to help.

The Thompson team, however, agreed with my assessment that campaigns could use the Internet differently and wanted me to come out to “The House” to chat about it. We agreed to meet the next day despite what would become a full-blown case of the flu. The Thompson team, it seems, had circulated that same flu about a week earlier and none of them were afraid of catching it again.

On May 23rd, I met with Team Fred and after a three hour discussion of new and innovative ways you could use the Internet to supplement a traditional campaign, I left with an assignment – build a Presidential website in the height of a media storm, that would withstand a huge rush of traffic the moment it launched, and do it all in 10 days.

The Launch

On June 5, 2007, we launched ImWithFred.com. The site was originally envisioned as a simple splash page that would gather low hanging fruit – early donors and supporters looking to sign up. A requirement that all forms be pre-populated so visitors would not have to fill in information more than once threw in a wrinkle and we ended up building personalization into a splash page – not something most people would do. We also ended up building tools that would allow viral recruitment for both donors and volunteers.

Now these tools were hardly new or innovative, but the combination of designing the data architecture, doing the graphic design work, cutting up the site, coding it all, and allowing time to test for bugs in 10 days (over Memorial Day weekend, no less) was about the craziest thing I have ever tried. The data architecture alone had to support huge traffic, and getting the servers provisioned, hardened and tested would eat into our ability to deploy a test environment. Doing all of this over the holiday made me very popular with the development team.

Speaking of the team, I have to give credit to Dan Hopkins, Blaise Hazelwood, Todd Zeigler, Ken Smith, Brian Lyle and the gang that pulled this together. They did an outstanding job getting the site launched under those conditions and rarely complained (to me at least).

On Hannity and Colmes, Fred announced his website url and the flood came in. We took a lot of heat for the thin site, but we didn’t have time for much else. Had we had a month to design, build and test, we could have done more. Given the time we had, and the limitations of working under the “Testing the Waters” rules, I thought we did fine. We attracted over 100,000 unique visitors, raised over a quarter million dollars, and added nearly 30,000 names to our list in the first 24 hours.

On June 12, we rolled out the Fred File, added Fred’s bio, and added tools to spread the word through traditional media by contacting talk radio and newspapers. I was traveling back from a meeting in Colorado that night on a flight that was seriously delayed. I ended up doing the go-live countdown from a seat just inside the arrival gate at Dulles airport on their wi-fi connection. We made the rollout about 30 minutes ahead of Fred’s appearance on Leno that night.

The blog was a hit almost instantly and led me to believe the path we had chosen was right. Fred’s commentaries were getting a lot of comments and I saw the beginning of an online community I’ve never seen around a GOP candidate’s online operation. What’s more, nobody wrote a single word about what supporters were saying online. Nobody accused us of endorsing the random beliefs espoused by the occasional nut, and nobody on the campaign had to answer a single press call (that I am aware of) about the blog or anything said on it.

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