Romney ad “misleading”; McCain responds

December 29, 2007 – 1:18 am

Mitt Romney dropped a negative ad in New Hampshire attacking John McCain. However, it seems that Romney, again, has some truthiness problems. Given the factual errors below, it is clear why McCain goes straight to Romney’s credibility problem.

Factcheck.org, "More Mitt Malarky":

Romney’s latest ad attacks McCain in New Hampshire with false and misleading claims

WaPo’s Howie Kurtz:

Mitt Romney, who targeted Mike Huckabee in an earlier commercial, is now running the most negative campaign of any presidential candidate in either party. … Romney’s description of McCain’s failed immigration bill — which was backed by President Bush — is so selective as to be misleading.

New York Times:

Specifically, Mr. Romney assails Mr. McCain on both tax policies and immigration. On both topics, the commercial presents facts that could be construed either as selective or worse, misleading.

Mark Halperin from Time points out:

First negative ad against Romney by any candidate, first negative ad by McCain, first negative ad by any candidate besides Romney.

Negative campaigning. Lying. Debating what the definition of "saw" is. Who does that sound like?

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Is the Romney campaign lying to reporters again?

December 23, 2007 – 2:22 am

From the Boston Phoenix: (H/T The Page)

Two women contacted the Mitt Romney campaign this week, offering their memories of seeing Romney’s father march with Martin Luther King Jr., in Grosse Point Michigan in 1963. Campaign officials were well aware that the women were mistaken. Yet, they directed those women to tell their stories to a Politico reporter. …

Then-governor George Romney did indeed march in Grosse Pointe, on Saturday, June 29, 1963, but Martin Luther King Jr. was not there; he was in New Brunswick, New Jersey, addressing the closing session of the annual New Jersey AFL-CIO labor institute at Rutgers University.

Those facts are indisputable, and quite frankly, the campaign must have known the women’s story would eventually be debunked — few people’s every daily movement has been as closely tracked and documented as King’s. As I write this, I am looking at an article from page E8 of the June 30, 1963 Chicago Tribune, which discusses both events (among other civil-rights actions of the previous day), clearly placing the two men hundreds of miles apart. I also have here the June 30, 1963 San Antonio News, which carries a photo and article about Romney at the Grosse Pointe march; and an AP story about King’s speech in New Jersey.

The Politico story is here. This echoes previous unprofessional and unethical behavior by the Romney campaign:

Deepening the mystery surrounding the anti-Mormon polling calls, the Romney campaign is confirming that it referred reporters to two recipients of the calls without disclosing that the two were also on the Romney campaign payroll, TPM Election Central has learned.

In response to questions from TPM Election Central, Romney spokesman Kevin Madden confirmed that the campaign had failed to disclose this info to reporters. Madden suggested that the campaign had identified them as "supporters," which is a far cry from being directly paid by the campaign, as the two call recipients were.

Of course, this is par for the course for a campaign whose staff and volunteer officials seem to resign regularly under criminal investigations.

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Substance-free Drudge attack on Rudy; Same for McCain?

December 21, 2007 – 2:54 pm

The day of the CNN/YouTube debate, Matt Drudge, handmaiden of  Mitt Romney’s campaign, raised the issue that became known as "Shag Fund." The claim was that Rudy Giuliani had improperly hid expenses for visiting his then girlfriend. Well, it turns out that it just wasn’t true. Powerline and Captain’s Quarters have the details. Total exoneration from the New York Times.

In other words, Drudge pushed a bogus story at a time that was quite opportune for the Romney campaign.

Yesterday, Drudge pushed a story on John McCain. Drudge first claimed that an NYT story was in the works. Then he claimed that it would publish tomorrow. McCain was forced to answer a question. What happened?

No story. Nothing happened in the Times. And, in fact, it was clear from the facts Drudge provided that no story would be there. No substance, as was made clear in the Washington Post story today.

That’s the story guys. Matt Drudge is a Romney shill.

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DMR and Globe endorse McCain

December 15, 2007 – 11:55 pm

The Des Moines Register and the Boston Globe endorsed John McCain today. The Register’s key quotes:

Yet, for all their accomplishments on smaller stages, none can offer the tested leadership, in matters foreign and domestic, of Sen. John McCain of Arizona. McCain is most ready to lead America in a complex and dangerous world and to rebuild trust at home and abroad by inspiring confidence in his leadership.

 

In an era of instant celebrity, we sometimes forget the real heroes in our midst. The defining chapter of McCain’s life came 40 years ago as a naval aviator, when he was shot down over Vietnam. The crash broke both arms and a leg. When first seeing him, a fellow prisoner recalls thinking he wouldn’t live the night. He was beaten and kept in solitary confinement, held 5 ears. He could have talked. He did not. Son of a prominent Navy admiral, he could have gained early release. He refused. …

 

McCain would enter the White House with deep knowledge of national-security and foreign-policy issues. He knows war, something we believe would make him reluctant to start one. He’s also a fierce defender of civil liberties. As a survivor of torture, he has stood resolutely against it. He pledges to start rebuilding America’s image abroad by closing the Guantanamo prison and beginning judicial proceedings for detainees.

 

McCain has his flaws, too, of course. He can be hot-tempered, a trait that’s not helpful in conducting diplomacy. At 71, his age is a concern. The editorial board disagrees with him on a host of issues, especially his opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage. McCain foresees a “long, hard and difficult” deployment of troops in Iraq. The Register’s board has called for withdrawal as soon as it’s safely possible.

 

But with McCain, Americans would know what they’re getting. He doesn’t parse words. And on tough calls, he usually lands on the side of goodness — of compassion for illegal immigrants, of concern for the environment for future generations.

 

The force of John McCain’s moral authority could go a long way toward restoring Americans’ trust in government and inspiring new generations to believe in the goodness and greatness of America.

Pretty good language. It should be pointed out that these are not huge endorsements in Republican primaries, unlike McCain’s endorsement in the Union Leader. That said, any candidate would be touting them.

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CNN setting a Romney narrative?

December 8, 2007 – 9:47 am

From yesterday.

Note the closing quote:

this is a narrative that is continuing with Mitt Romney that he says something publicly that might not match what he is doing privately or what he has done in the past

H/T: Jen Rubin. Marc Ambinder was also there.

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Union Leader endorses McCain; Romney goes negative

December 1, 2007 – 7:13 pm

Drudge is reporting that the NH Union Leader is endorsing John McCain tomorrow. My gut is that, as newspaper endorsements go, this is a relatively big deal. The UL is influential in NH, and it can also drive local media.

For a while people thought that Mitt Romney was going to get this endorsement. It was long the conventional wisdom that Judd Gregg would go with Romney, and Joe McQuaid, the UL editor, is very close to Gregg. In fact, NH sources tell me, McQuaid called Gregg to tell him about the endorsement, as a courtesy and recognition of their long friendship. Unfortunately, the Romney campaign had no such deference to the friendship. They leaked the story to Drudge and started moving around negative material on McCain.

Typical Romney scorched-earth tactics. Of course, if the recent Fox News poll is any indication, Romney may end up with something to worry about in NH.

Of course, it seemed that a McCain endorsement was likely. They had whacked Fred Thompson repeatedly. McQuaid is very pro-life, and so Rudy was out of the question. And McQuaid had attacked Romney on abortion:

CAN PRO-LIFE Americans count on Mitt Romney to protect the unborn? Maybe, but Romney has not been convincing on this point. …

That is not reassuring. It is a tacit admission that he told the people of Massachusetts what they wanted to hear, essentially saying he would govern according to state law and not his own personal beliefs, but then governing according to those personal beliefs. …

Romney has given two accounts of his changing views on abortion. One is that he was pro-choice until 2005, when he became pro-life after researching stem cell issues. The other is that he was personally pro-life but refused to impose his views on the people of Massachusetts.

Both cannot be true. Which is it? We are not sure we care. But we do care that Romney has two stories that don’t mesh and appears to have inadvertently admitted to taking a position on this issue because it was politically expedient to do so.

In Iowa, Romney’s line that he is tired of people being "holier than thou" because they’ve been pro-life longer than he has was a good one. But it’s not about who’s been pro-life longer. It’s about whether Romney really is pro-life. Despite his assurances, we, along with many conservatives, are not convinced he is.

What happens if the UL really goes after Romney? An extended attack on Romney’s credibility could do a lot of damage. And there’s plenty of material.

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Did McCain win the battle of the “bitch”?

November 16, 2007 – 1:48 pm

So, there was a three-ish day media frenzy on this. The video on YouTube has been watched almost 1m times. It was rebroadcast hundreds of times. Whoopi Goldberg defended John McCain on The View to a bunch of liberal women.

CNN rebroadcast the exchange repeatedly, as they tried to smear him. Including John McCain saying that he was beating Hillary in the polls.

Isn’t that a win?

Oh, and AOL viewers thought that John McCain handled it well by a 2-1 margin.

And, on a side note, for the guys wondering about where the eyeballs are on the internet, I thought this, from the YouTube page was a compelling statistic:

Nuff said? AOL had 40x the next source of eyeballs. Doesn’t that mean something?

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Righty blogs: Activism versus media management

October 30, 2007 – 10:51 am

Jon Henke, currently with the Fred Thompson campaign and previously with Senator Mitch McConnell and former Senator George Allen, weighed in on the discussion about the role of righty-blogs. He said:

I think these compositional sociological explanations for the differences between Left and Right in the blogosphere and activist communities are over-complicated and unnecessary. The dominance of the Left online is not a permanent phenomenon. It is a reflection of the cyclical fact that the Left is angry, unified, surging and being effectively supported by people and organizations with long term strategic goals. They have a common cause, a unifying vision and a raison d’etre.

The Right does not.

I am pretty sure that Jon and I agree on all of this, but I want to clarify something. The sociological explanation is about activism. The structure is about managing the media. One is, in the end, a project of giving activists the tools to express their ideas, passions, etc. The other is, to some extent, a mechanical framing and outreach. Let’s look at some examples.

The Center for American Progress has a daily email. The audience for this email is Hill staffers, the press, and bloggers. It has a main article. And it has a little blog summary. The links are to a Media Matters blog (Glenn Greenwald), Think Progress, TPM Muckraker, (the 3 wings of the lefty online messaging apparatus) and a defeatist blog on Iraq.

I don’t know what the distribution is on this, but we do know that CAP is targeting the media. So they are driving media eyeballs to these blogs, raising their profile among the people who have the power to reproduce the message. And, even if they don’t actually reproduce this message, the persistent framing will have some impact.

Imagine if the right had a similar thing. A daily email with the top-line message from the right. It would contain links to milblogs that actually explain what is going on on the ground in Iraq. Explanations of the good things that the Bush administration is doing. Links to good information on the Democrats’ current legislative proposals, like a $3.5b tax increase. Links to corrupt things that Democrats are doing around the country. All in one place. And easy for the media — and bloggers — to consume. Over a year or so, this would totally reshape the blogosphere. And, frankly, this might facilitate the growth of new blogs that are more media savvy.

And we would have a separate set of emails for activists of different varieties. Probably a little more shrill. A little more closely targeted to interest groups, etc. Redstate is working on that second one. Some of the groups like AFP, FRC, RTL, etc., could also do this.

But no one is working on the first one. Heritage could, perhaps, but its focus is, legitimately, on the Hill. Rob Bluey is one person, not the 5 or 10 that it would take to implement this on a daily basis. And — this is where I say something controversial — perhaps Heritage represents the old coalition, headed by Ed Meese and a bunch of Reagan era people and grounded in the conservative movement of the 70s.

This wouldn’t take a lot of money. It wouldn’t take that many staff, but it would take smart people. And willing donors.

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The infrastructure of the new political message machine

October 27, 2007 – 12:35 pm

This post has two real online stimuli and a bunch of offline ones, although it is not clearly apropos of any:

The broader point that I am going to try to make is that the political blogosphere is in profound flux, and the constants have more to do with the information that it processes and exposes than the people who are doing it. This is part 1 of 2. The second post will be about the changing political blogosphere.

My point is about how campaigns and interest groups inject information into the political debate. And where the people are. I took this to be the discussion that Patrick was really working on. Patrick said:

The new progressive movement started with guys like Atrios, who then got picked up by Media Matters. Dozens of lefty bloggers are employed by the new lefty infrastructure. As far as I know, Erick Erickson at Red State, and possibly my Townhall co-bloggers MKH and Matt Lewis, are the only ones employed full time by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Blog Division, who aren’t primarily journalists and as such have real freedom of action.

Now, Stoller objects:

Finally, it’s important to realize that there’s been almost no investment in the liberal blogs, which is dramatically different than what has gone on with the right side of the web, where Regnery Publishing literally bought Redstate, Republicans have been feeding Drudge tidbits since 1997, fellowships for people like the Powerline guys are the norm, and even the military is intensely cooperative.  While peripheral groups like the Center for American Progress, Media Matters, and Moveon do deploy capital, actual activists have almost zero support either institutionally or financially.

I side with Patrick on this. A bunch of leading lefty bloggers have been picked up by the ideological media and interest groups. Ezra Klein to the Prospect,  Kevin Drum to the Washington Monthly, Oliver Willis and Duncan Black to Media Matters, Glenn Greenwald to Salon, and Think Progress is a "project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund" (the website even says "Faiz Shakir is the Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Editor of ThinkProgress.org"), etc. (interestingly, The Atlantic has tried the same, with Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan, but none of their "righty" bloggers are really part of the righty blogosphere)

On the right, there has been some of this, but less. Redstate is owned by Eagle and Townhall by Salem. Robert Bluey is now at Heritage, where part of his job — I think — is to inject more Heritage information into the blogosphere. Are there any other major examples? (Ed Morrissey to Blog Talk Radio seems related but I don’t know how to parse)

So let’s be clear what has happened. Media Matters and CAP were started — to explicitly critique and shape the mainstream media — and hired a bunch of good bloggers … to blog, often with MM and CAP talking points. They are distribution mechanisms. Some of the lefty media has also hired good bloggers … to blog. The only person who I can think of who has gone from blogging to the righty media is Dean Barnett, and he no longer blogs.

On a broader level, what has happened is that a certain component of the research departments of the DNC has been outsourced to CAP, MM, and TPM and they have created distribution channels to move that information. The RNC and our campaigns have to worry about "no fingerprints" when they move negative material. The entire distribution mechanism on the left is built around this problem. These groups can also attack the the White House. Let’s be clear. The DNC the congressional Democrats don’t have to worry about fighting back against the White House. CAP, MM, and the blogs do that for them. There is no similar capacity on our side.

I want to step into history for a moment. Similar things have been done in the past on the GOP side. In 1982, the Washington Times was started to, in part, get the Reagan message out. Heritage helped give analytic firepower to a GOP congressional minority. One of the great untold stories of the Gingrich Revolution is the relationship between Heritage and the GOP congressional majority. Prior to 1994, congressional committee staff ratios were sometimes as high as 10-1 in favor of the Dems. (now they are about 2-1, in favor of the majority, with a couple of exceptions) Heritage allowed congressional Republicans to have the analytic capacity to fight back. When the GOP took over in 94, they slashed staff levels. In many cases, the Democratic committee staff fell by over 100 people. And we still had Heritage, while the Dems had no analytic capacity. But they had the administration which can crunch its own numbers and do its own credible analysis.

Two other interesting side effects of the role of Heritage. The first is that Heritage supports the Republican Study Committee and the Senate Republican Steering Committee, the two conservative caucuses. One, of several, reasons that the congressional GOP moderates lose so many fights is that they are opposed by significant analytic capacity. The second is that  Hill staffers can download talking points and give them to their boss. This means that GOP Hill staffers tend to be — and can be — more politically-oriented and less policy-oriented. That is one source of GOP message discipline.

It wasn’t until the Dems lost the White House and the Congress, that they realized that they needed organizations like CAP. And CAP, unlike Heritage, focuses on the media.

Stepping back from history, into today, conseratives and Republicans have not built the message distribution mechanism. On today’s memeorandum leaderboard, ThinkProgress is #6. It is a thinktank. If you combine the results for TPM, TPM Muckraker, and the Horse’s Mouth, they are almost tied with ThinkProgress. Information is produced by those guys.  Combining the two of those, only NYT and WaPo initiate more stories. And all of those are framed, very, very effectively, by bloggers who work for Media Matters.

Now, conservatives have alternative media outlets that can move our message, when we have them. Rush, Fox, etc. But those don’t drive news, they drive opinion, and you need both. Blogs are important because they drive news. Therefore, it is clear that we need a mechanism to drive the news cycle. Some of that will be informal coordination. Some of that will be a mechanism similar to CAP, MM, and TPM.

We have done this before, but only when out of power. It will develop. But it sure would be handy to have before then. It strikes me that there should be plenty of soft money willing to demonstrate that Hillary Clinton is a crook or that the corruption of congressional Democrats makes John Doolittle and Jack Abramoff blush. But the guys with the cash are sitting happy because their guys are, for now, in power.

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Grasping new tools

August 31, 2007 – 10:27 am

As my friends Patrick Ruffini, Rob Bluey, and Justin Hart have pointed out, a bunch of us organized a new media training workshop at Heritage, sponsored by Google, on Wednesday. It was a success. About 200 people attended. It was truly extraordinary.

The goal, more than anything else, was to begin a discussion on how organizations, candidates, etc. can move move messages and engage people on line. We are planning to continue this in several forms:

  1. Smaller workshops for congressional staff, campaigns, and interest groups in Washington. We need to build their effectiveness.
  2. A road show. As a number of us have pointed out, the problem is less acute in Washington than it is in the state capitals and municipalities around the country. Simply put, if we had 100 more people like GraniteGrok and GilfordGrok — politically active, smart, technologically savvy, and very, very dilligent online activists –, Republicans and conservatives would be in a much better place.

Ultimately, this is a human resources and a skills question. We also need online tools like RightRoots, but you cannot produce information and framing of information. Ultimately, at all levels, the left is successfully framing the messages, especially at the local level, where the quality of reporting is lower, the amount of genuine news content is smaller, and the ability to speak directly to readers is larger.

One of the leading lefty blogs, Atrios, made an important point that we should keep in mind:

Now that’s not how I see things as I think blogs should be seen more as an opportunity to influence media coverage and narratives, as well as helping to stitch together a broader-based political movement.

But it isn’t very surprising the Democrats don’t really understand how blogs work within the media, as they’ve long failed to understand how the media works generally. So it’s difficult to communicate and explain the "good" the blogs can do when a lot of them just see us as a noisy sometimes-pain-in-the-ass. This isn’t true of everyone in DC, of course, but one has to remember that of congressional staffers are often shockingly young and really can’t be expected, no matter what their talents, to have a grip on all this stuff in a sophisticated way.

I think that we should take this and separate out his points.

First, blogs are a media tool. They have fundamentally changed the economics and ecology of all types of information in our society. The Democrats have an apparatus to move the media narratives to the left. Without a comparable force pushing back, the media and their narratives will go there. And the only way that we can apply that pressure is to develop bloggers at the grassroots and train staff to work with those bloggers effectively.

Second, movements use contemporary tools that match their constituencies. A number of liberal bloggers have told me that they feel like Barack Obama doesn’t care about them because he thinks that he can get his attention somewhere else. Well, he is getting the level of mobilization that he needs from  young, rich  activists through social networking tools like facebook and African-Americans through email. He is building a new movement. It looks like it may be going nowhere in the short term, but it may in the long-term. When conservatives figure out how to add to our coalition, we will use the tools of the day. And we will help build those tools and have the experience to maximize them.

In the end, football comes down to blocking and tackling. In politics, that means:

  1. GOTV. The RNC and the state parties are better at that than anyone else right now, if we can get the volunteers.
  2. Fundraising. We aren’t looking so good, but it is clear that "online" fundraising isn’t the answer, or the difference.
  3. Media. We are losing here big time.

Our effort on Wednesday is the beginning of a long, slow, necessary, and, ultimately, very valuable process to move on the third.

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