So this morning was the Mitt Romney’s hypocritical bigotry towards Muslims scandal.
Then the Boston Herald broke that Romney’s affirmative-action judge had screwed up and let out a child-rapist before Romney gave her a promotion.
And now Rudy Giuliani was making New York City pay for his affair?
Proud day to be a Republican.
The Politico’s Jonathan Martin asked one of the kings of political sleaze what he thought of the Mitt Romney phone calls. He sees a historical antecedent in the the 1960 JFK race:
Just as Bobby Kennedy was behind anti-Catholic calls and literature to Catholic Households in The 1960 Democratic Party. I smell a dirty trick. I suspect a pro-Romney motive to inoculate against future use of the religious issue and to breed sympathy for Romney.
No respectable Republican polling firm like Tarrance would be involved with this.
PS- a 20-minute call is the work of an amateur. The long call is designed to get ALL the negatives out, to put them off limits for future attacks.
To paraphrase, either the Romney campaign is behind it or someone allied with them is. An inoculation strategy.
That strategy depends on getting a media hit. Like hitting a Romney-supporting State Rep. Or a county chairman. I described a similar thing that happened in a campaign that I am familiar with. The campaign of a Democratic Jewish candidate called voters attacking the religion of their own candidate to drive attention.
Erick Erickson at Redstate describes a similar thing.
Let’s be clear. This is a stock technique of sleazy politics.
And, the Romney campaign has managed to include a number of practitioners of sleazy politics. Warren Tompkin’s, who is alleged to have attacked John McCain in 2000, is in charge of a firm that ran a sleazy website attacking Fred Thompson. Not to mention the faux-cop scandal, which eventually led to the firing of Jay Garrity, Romney’s long-time director of operations. As I said at the time of the PhoneyFred scandal:
This is another in a long list of thuggery and illegality of Romney associates and campaign staff. Including Romney’s former Director of Operations Jay Garrity, Romney’s former national finance co-chair, Romney’s other indicted former national finance co-chair, etc. And then the Romney campaign threatens voters if they do things like ask questions (note that in South Carolina, the Romney campaign doesn’t even allow that)
To prove a crime, you need means, motive, and opportunity. The Romney campaign has the motive. They have the means financially, intellectually, and logistically. And there is lots of circumstantial evidence linking the Romney campaign and his supporters to the people that used the weapon. Opportunity? Well, that’s self-evident, if it happens.
There’s a case here. More facts are necessary, but there’s a real case.
Tags: Ethics, Romney, romney phone scandal
I’ve been out of the country for about a week. So I come back, and start digging through the news. And I come to this ad by Mitt Romney.
Romney is classing this election up by attacking Hillary Clinton over sex with his "internship" line. I want to be clear about something.
We will lose with this kind of behavior. We will get crushed with this kind of behavior. Attacking Bill on sex in the 90s didn’t work. He left office with twice President Bush’s approval rating.
Furthermore, as I have pointed out repeatedly, Hillary is a crook. She makes Bob Ney look like a choir boy. It is clear that she has been involved in profound campaign finance fraud related to Norman Hsu, etc. There was also the party that she accepted a $1m in-kind for several years ago. There is all the 90s era stuff with Bill.
But attacking her for sex is going to put us in the same place. Mitt Romney should be ashamed of himself, not that he’s capable of that. And not that he’s at any risk of winning the presidency anyways.
Matt Margolis is doing the right thing. Mitt Romney is not.
Tags: Clinton, Corruption, Ethics, Romney
You don’t often get to write this sentence, so I had to do it:
| State of New Mexico | $277,230 |
| University of New Mexico | $31,950 |
| Total from NM State Employees | $309,180 |
Bill Richardson would be violating congressional ethics if he were still in Congress.
What am I talking about? Bill Richardson received over $300,000 from his employees. Open Secrets has the details. Congressional ethics (at least House ethics) prohibit staff from giving money to (1) their boss (because of the possibility of a raise for a donation) or (2) other members (because it would look like a back channel version of the same)
Shouldn’t it be an issue that his largest block of donors get paid by him?
Make presidential candidates live by the same ethics rules as Members of Congress.
Normally that would sound farcical, but it might be a good idea here.
Tags: Ethics, Fundraising, Richardson
Yesterday, Kevin Hassett, an economist at AEI and a member of John McCain’s economics team, pointed out something that we forget. Hillary Clinton is a big ole porker:
Democrats have been so busy preparing the coronation of Hillary Clinton that they have failed to train a critical eye on her record.
When it comes to earmarks, an issue that voters responded to more than any other in the last election except for Iraq, her record is about as bad as it gets. If Dennis Hastert was the king of earmarks, Hillary Clinton was his queen. Republicans had their “bridge to nowhere.'’ Hillary has her knitting mill. …
The Clinton campaign refused to respond at all to requests that she identify her earmarks.
Here’s a project for diligent GOP and conservative activists:
We have the time to do the research. And the press believes that the Clintons are crooks. This will just be another fact after Norman Hsu, etc. If we get the facts, I think that these facts will get told on more than Fox.
Tags: Clinton, Corruption, Ethics, Republicans, Technology
Andrew Sullivan makes a powerful argument against Hillary Clinton:
A thief and liar is hired by Clinton. But his thievery is less important to Clinton than his loyalty. After all, his theft was an attempt to keep president Clinton’s failures with respect to al Qaeda under wraps. And so he gets a pardon. Remember: the Clintons are on their best behavior right now. And they still rehire their corrupted loyalists. Like the other royal family, the Clinton court exists to reward loyalty, protect the brand, circle the wagons and to punish dissenters. With post-Cheney executive powers, the potential for the Clinton machine to abuse their power more profoundly than in the 1990s is high.
The Clintons are crooks. No question about it. And the inability of our party to stand anywhere credibly of corruption is going to make it hard to attack her.
Tags: Clinton, Corruption, Ethics
I keep giggling whenever I read about the Norman Hsu scandal.
First, Fred Thompson got it right. Didn’t the Clinton’s learn anything from the fundraising scandals of the 90s?
Second, the first great fundraising scandal of the post-Abramoff ethics era is about an illegal donor. He didn’t give money for ideological reasons. He gave money so that he could pretend to other people that he had access.
Third, it was about bundling. The new ethics reform legislation addressed bundling … by lobbyists. Not felons. And not random donors.
Oh well. Somehow, I don’t think that the Democrats are looking for ethics reform.
Tags: Clinton, Corruption, Ethics, Fundraising
Earlier today, Jonathan Martin pointed out the new www.phoneyFred.org website:
Clearly, though, this is no amateur effort. The volume of information and the way that it’s sourced reeks of a grasstops hit-job. Repeatingly calling Thompson "Phoney Fred" in the on-message style of political operatives, the site offers up unflattering quotes with the standard attribution style of oppo everywhere.
Turns out it wasn’t amateur at all. According to WaPo, it was put together by Mitt Romney’s paid consultants:
Nowhere on the site does it indicate who is responsible for it. But a series of inquiries leads directly to the website of Under the Power Lines, the political consulting firm of Warren Tompkins, Romney’s lead consultant in South Carolina.
This is another in a long list of thuggery and illegality of Romney associates and campaign staff. Including Romney’s former Director of Operations Jay Garrity, Romney’s former national finance co-chair, Romney’s other indicted former national finance co-chair, etc. And then the Romney campaign threatens voters if they do things like ask questions (note that in South Carolina, the Romney campaign doesn’t even allow that):
On Sept. 3, I attended a house party for Mitt Romney … a gentleman approached me and said if I started any trouble I would be thrown out of the event. … He reiterated I would be tossed out because my "kind" weren’t welcome at such an event. … All the while, he used his 6-foot frame to intimidate my 5-foot-4-inch body. He then introduced the grandson of the homeowner, the man running his New Hampshire campaign, the very same man who attempted to bully me into silence.
Thugs and illegality. If a guy surrounds himself with these kinds of people on the campaign, who is he going to surround himself with if he becomes President?
Tags: Ethics, New Hampshire, Romney, South Carolina
This really isn’t a surprise, but Roll Call has the news. Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ) will not run for re-election. The FBI raid was making this swing seat even harder to keep, and there was a lot of pressure from the NRCC to get out.
There will undoubtedly be a nasty primary. The one Renzi won in 2002 was described to me once as a bloodbath between the Catholics, Evangelicals, and Mormons. Renzi, a Catholic, won with 24%, with the next two candidates each having 20% and another with 16%. Less than a 2k vote margin.
This is also a swing seat. His first race, a good year for Republicans, he won with only 3% or 6k votes. In 2006, the margin was larger with 7% or about 13k votes. Expect a brawl, especially with Arizona being a swing state. A swing seat in a swing state means a lot of money…
Tags: Arizona, AZ 01, Congress, Ethics, Republicans
Fred Barnes has another great piece, this time in the Journal:
The recipe for Republicans is to stop acting like, well, Republicans–that is, Republicans of recent vintage. In Congress, they’ve been soft on earmarks, the source of so much corruption. They practically invited Democrats to trump them on ethics and lobbying reform. And they’ve allowed their obsession with illegal immigrants to get out of hand. This drives away Hispanic voters and leaves the impression that Republicans are small-minded, ungenerous and nasty. The worst offenders are the presidential candidates, who would be wise to tone down their rhetoric on immigration.
I have a lot of non-political and Democratic friends. When they go after me for being a Republican, these are the two issues that they talk about, and two issues tht I have no response to. They think that we are wrong on Iraq, but they respect us. Besides, Democrats are increasingly admitting that the surge in Iraq is making progress militarily. But on immigration and ethics, we are clearly hopeless right now.
There has been a debate about whether earmarks are the problem and a good political issue. Patrick Hynes has taken the position that while they are bad, they are not a motivating issue. Ramesh Ponnuru has argued that there is not much there substantively. While I agree with the substance of their criticism, I think it misses the point. To quote John McCain, "earmarks are [the] gateway to corruption." The corruption in our party turns off a lot of voters. We are not talking about using this as an issue to fire up activists, we are talking about fixing the image.
The GOP needs a good lynching of its own crooks:
Forcing two or three House members and at least one senator to retire would involve more than friendly persuasion and no doubt provoke strong resistance. But the effort would attract national attention–favorable attention, for a change.
In other words, publicly shoot Representatives Rick Renzi and John Doolittle and Senator Ted Stevens with friendly fire. Then we start pushing for some real reform. After we show that we are serious about ethics and corruption, we can really go after the Dems on this. After all, they really are the party of institutionalized corruption.
Now this is not about getting us out of our hole on our broader coalition issues, and this is not an activist issue. But it is a way to start rebuilding trust between the voters and the party. We don’t have a plan for another 20-30 years of victory yet, but neither do the Democrats. However, we do have a strategy to get to parity.
Tags: Ethics, Republicans
My 2008 Ticker
