Killing the Messenger Page 7

  The night before Romney’s selection, Twitter lit up with news that the choice would be announced at a rally in Virginia. I panicked, thinking that the nod would go to Virginia governor Bob McDonnell—and we’d be totally unprepared. Fortunately, of course, that didn’t happen. Romney picked Paul Ryan. Our MeetPaulRyan.com website went live immediately. And even during the initial coverage of his selection—one of the easiest media cycles for a presidential campaign to dominate—our research on Ryan made it into the first news stories.

  In the eight years I’d been pitching Media Matters, I’d learned a lot about the donors I’d be relying on to fund American Bridge.

  Back then, Rob Stein had warned me about the tendency of progressive donors to flit from one cause to the next. Rob was right, of course, but at Media Matters we had shown that if you had strong content and measurable results, donors could be convinced to build and sustain permanent institutions.

  I also learned that unlike, say, the Koch brothers, most progressive donors were not transactional, which was fortunate, because I had no favors to trade or access to grant. In any case, no one ever asked. (And the next person I meet who writes a check just because they want to have their picture taken with David Brock will be the first.)

  But now we had another hurdle to jump—Democratic donors just didn’t like SuperPACs. And we needed to raise millions of dollars to make American Bridge a reality.

  We were fortunate that, by this time, Media Matters was a thriving $10-million-a-year enterprise. It was to these donors that I would naturally turn to seed American Bridge.

  As a group, Media Matters donors are a fearless bunch. Many of them, it turned out, didn’t want to disarm. They were up for the fight. At our first prospecting dinner in Boston, we raised $700,000 from a dozen people. Once American Bridge started scoring some victories, it became as hot a commodity in the donor world as Media Matters was. And in the end, our donor pool, including supporters of both organizations, would end up consisting of some four hundred generous people giving between $10,000 and $1 million every year—with an unheard-of annual renewal rate of more than 90 percent.

  This was, of course, another step in my journey toward being what I never imagined I’d become: a Democratic operative.

  But, to be honest, I never really felt like I was making a big transition as I looked to add American Bridge to the portfolio of work I was doing at Media Matters. Both organizations were in the business of promoting liberalism over conservatism simply by promoting facts over fiction.

  I am, as you have probably figured out by now, much more of a practical person than I am an ideological one. To be sure, I never would have built these organizations if I didn’t comfortably hold progressive views, or if I wasn’t interested in seeing the progressive agenda prevail. But unlike the institutional builders on the right, and what may be a surprise to my critics, I am not an ideologue. In fact, my experience in the conservative movement made me alert to the dangers of sectarianism. I wanted to fight the right, not move my own party to the left.

  I would make my contribution by eventually employing over one hundred people at American Bridge, researching the records of Republican candidates, showing up at their events to record everything they said, poring over position papers to look for inconsistencies or extremist statements—and then publicizing them. Together with our allied groups, we created a permanent capacity to go on offense against Republicans, launching missiles from our side in what Newt Gingrich described as “the information wars.”

  To be sure, Democrats were still outspent on the independent expenditure side in the 2012 election. But we were in the game. We made careful monitoring of the other side our top priority, we looked for opportunities to use conservatives’ own words against them, we resisted the temptation to spin our own information instead of simply letting the facts speak for themselves, and we were fully transparent in our work. American Bridge became a Media Matters for politics.

  And like Media Matters, American Bridge argued for its own necessity by winning some important victories.

  Even with Democrats defending twenty-three seats in the 2012 election cycle (compared with the ten Republicans were defending), we were confident that Democrats could maintain their slim majority—in no small part because we knew that the Tea Party movement that had been so dangerous for Democrats two years earlier could easily end up being equally dangerous for Republicans.

  When Republicans looked at Indiana’s and Missouri’s Senate races, they saw two Republican wins: an easy incumbent hold in Indiana, where moderate Republican Dick Lugar hadn’t faced real competition since 1982, and a first-tier pickup opportunity in Missouri, where Democrat Claire McCaskill faced serious opposition in a purple-to-red state.

  But when we looked at the field in those two states, we saw opportunity. In Indiana, a Tea Partier named Richard Mourdock was primarying Lugar from the right. Mourdock quickly revealed himself to be exactly the kind of Republican who could lose a race even in deep-red Indiana: Early in his campaign, our trackers caught him questioning the constitutionality of Medicare and Social Security. We filed it away. Meanwhile, when we looked at the crowded Republican primary field in Missouri, one candidate stuck out: Rep. Todd Akin, who had said in the summer of 2011 that “at the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God.” We hoped that Mourdock and Akin would win their primaries—and we did what we could to help.

  In Indiana, we got to work making up for three decades in which nobody had bothered to run a real race against Dick Lugar (meaning nobody had bothered to do any opposition research against him). We highlighted parts of his record that might fire up Tea Partiers to oppose him, and even tweeted at Mourdock to show him a video we put together challenging Lugar’s residency—he had sold his Indiana home in 1977 and lived in McLean, Virginia. Later, we discovered that Lugar had violated Senate rules by billing taxpayers for hotel stays in Indianapolis while claiming he still lived in the state, causing a series of embarrassing stories.

  We executed the same strategy in Missouri, keeping our knowledge of Akin’s extremism to ourselves and focusing instead on helping to undermine the two somewhat more moderate candidates. In truth, we didn’t have to do as much here; Akin’s two opponents spent the campaign attempting to destroy each other, and mostly doing a pretty good, if ultimately self-defeating, job of it.

  The day after Todd Akin won the Missouri primary, we caught him telling a radio interviewer that he wanted to ban the morning-after pill, which he considered to be a form of abortion. A little over a week after that, our Missouri tracker was watching a local political TV show when Akin said the words that would make him nationally famous: “First of all, from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

  The interviewer didn’t seem to get what Akin had just said—the show had been taped a couple days earlier, and nobody had raised a ruckus. But our tracker practically leapt out of his seat, sending a report back to our DC war room immediately and setting our operation in motion. We quickly got the story moving through press outlets and on social media, and by that evening, it was national news.

  It could have been just a very bad day for the Akin campaign, except for two things. First, his team bungled the response, attempting to defend and explain the offensive comment. Second, and most importantly, we were able to show that Akin’s “gaffe” was no gaffe at all, but rather a reflection of what he truly believed—and the way he would vote in the Senate. We had hours of tracking footage in our archive that we deployed to illustrate that Akin was a true extremist, and we put it all online on a website we created (AkinTV.com). And we had plenty of research to illustrate that he wasn’t an isolated example within the Republican Party: Paul Ryan himself had cosponsored legislation with Akin redefining “forcible rape.”

  With Akin’s comments sparking months of conversation about Republican insensitivity to women’s health care
(and especially to survivors of rape), it would have taken a real lunatic to step in it all over again that fall. Fortunately, one had been nominated in Indiana. On October 23, at a debate with Democrat Joe Donnelly, Richard Mourdock said that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” This drew national attention to the race, and we made sure reporters had plenty to see when they did start to look at Mourdock’s record, dumping out all our research online.

  In both states, we ended up using the Republicans’ own words against them—literally. Voters received our talking mailers, much like singing birthday cards, that played Akin and Mourdock’s offensive remarks when opened. And on Election Night, Democrats won in both states.

  Of course, another Democrat won on Election Night 2012, as well: President Barack Obama. I’m sure that American Bridge’s new model of research and communications played a role in his victory. And Priorities, the pro-Obama ad fund, made its own big impact on the race by turning a thousand-page Bridge research book on Romney’s business record into a series of devastating TV ads highlighting the adverse impact on American workers.

  The truth is that Democrats would never have been celebrating on Election Night if they had chosen to stay “pure” and let Karl Rove and his allies have the SuperPAC world to themselves.

  If you think back on the 2012 race, your first thoughts are probably of Mitt Romney blowing it, showing the world that he was every bit the out-of-touch rich guy Democrats kept saying he was. Maybe it was when he said at the Iowa State Fair that “corporations are people.” Maybe it was when he told reporters in South Carolina that “I get speakers’ fees from time to time, but not very much”—and it turned out that “not very much” added up to nearly $375,000. Maybe it was the car elevator he planned to build at his giant mansion in La Jolla, California, allowing former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm to quip at the Democratic National Convention, “In Romney’s world, the cars get the elevator; the workers get the shaft!”

  Mitt Romney was indeed the gift that kept on giving. But someone had to find the gifts, wrap them, and deliver them. That’s what we did, whether it was capturing the “corporations are people” remark on a tracker camera, quickly doing the math on Romney’s speakers’ fees, or flying to California and digging through city records to find the plans for the Romney car elevator.

  Time after time, we found raw material—an off-hand comment on the stump, a tense moment in a debate, a file from some dusty archive—and turned it into another liability for Romney and the Republicans. Our research found its way into ads, newscasts, and, sometimes, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

  That summer, James Carville told me that he thought American Bridge was the biggest innovation in politics since the Clinton “War Room” of 1992—and that I should expect the Republicans to copy it in the next cycle.

  Sure enough, they did. After President Obama won reelection, a group of former Romney officials launched America Rising, a SuperPAC explicitly meant to copy what American Bridge was doing. The Republican National Committee’s postelection “autopsy” noted that the GOP had been outmaneuvered by us on the oppo research front, and that correcting the problem was a top priority—the first time, as far as I can tell, that Republicans had found themselves playing catch-up when it came to these tactics.

  Today, Democrats no longer have a monopoly on the kind of aggressive research and communications approach we pioneered at American Bridge. For example, in 2014, Republican researchers discovered that Montana senator John Walsh (D) had plagiarized large sections of his senior thesis at the Army War College, forcing him to withdraw from the race, which was eventually won by a Republican.

  While copying our tactics, the Republicans also sought to blunt them by training their candidates to avoid Akin-Mourdock moments on the stump. The New York Times described what sounds like a program of hazing for new Republican candidates, in which party operatives posing as trackers ambush them at airport baggage carousels and in other unguarded settings—a reminder that American Bridge is always watching. Indeed, in one memorable moment from the 2014 cycle, Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown decided to take a canoe out for a day trip; an American Bridge tracker was right behind him in another canoe, recording all the while.

  Meanwhile, many of the same factors at play in the last midterm reared their heads once again; Democrats lost control of the Senate and fell even further behind in the race for control of the House.

  But the defeat wasn’t a permanent one. In politics, it never is.

  At American Bridge, we did our own “autopsy.” It’s up to us to adjust to their adjustments—to stay smarter, more aggressive, and more creative in making sure that Democrats keep the edge we need to win. We’re already developing new approaches to make our tracking more effective (although we still haven’t made paddling a canoe part of the job interview for applicants), and working with all the power players on the progressive side to tune up other aspects of our own model, while also figuring out new ways to jam the other side’s circuits.

  Without tipping off our future plans to the Republican researchers who are no doubt scrutinizing this book, I’ll just say that we’re ready to roll out some innovations that have yet to be seen on the political battlefield—and that Republicans should indeed be running scared. But that’s true of any candidate in this modern era of campaign warfare—and with the stage set for the climactic battle in 2016, the arms race is escalating faster than ever.

  Chapter Three

  The Party of Koch

  One morning in 1994, I was summoned to the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown to sit down with the man who funded my anti-Clinton work at the American Spectator—my benefactor, my sugar daddy, the Wizard of conservative Oz: Richard Mellon Scaife. He was pleasant enough, but quiet; his aides did all the talking and, to me, seemed to be running the show. You wouldn’t have known that the ruddy-faced man quietly listening to the conversation was one of the most powerful unelected people in America.

  When Richard Mellon Scaife passed away in July 2014, I had occasion to spend some time thinking about his legacy. He was generous with his largesse. I vividly remember Spectator staffers sending off “Dear Mr. Scaife” letters to his office in Pittsburgh asking for six-figure sums for anti-Clinton research, requests that were generally granted quickly and with no questions asked.

  But if you didn’t share his commitment to conservative ideology, it wouldn’t be hard to see him as some kind of comic book supervillain. After all, few people did more damage to the progressive project in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Scaife’s banking fortune underwrote the work of powerful right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, and later funded the torpedoing of the Clinton presidency through his support of scandal-mongering publications like the Spectator, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and NewsMax.

  Scaife was an institution builder. Instead of getting ramped up to support candidates in one election cycle and then going on vacation until the next even-numbered year, he believed in the importance of conservative infrastructure: infrastructure to generate and spread ideas, infrastructure to constantly dig up dirt on anyone standing in your way, and infrastructure to get that dirt published.

  Still, most of us aren’t billionaires, and when we imagine what we’d do if we suddenly became billionaires, the answer usually involves beach vacations, private jets, or art collections, rather than plowing our time, our energy, and our fortune into political outcomes. Once you’ve made it to the top of the mountain, why not enjoy the view?

  It can be hard to understand what really motivates people to do the things they do. In Scaife’s case, I don’t think it was a personal vendetta against the Clintons. Indeed, like me, he would later go on to befriend them and even support their work. His was, rather, a deep commitment to a pure libertarian vision for American society, one in which government played as small a role as possible and people were largely left to fend for themselves.
Scaife was also something of an antiestablishment radical, which I thought was a little misplaced. After all, his middle name was Mellon—as in the Mellons who founded a bank, owned an oil company, built ships, and became one of the most influential families in America—and a good part of the fortune that he would use to shape our political landscape had been inherited. Horatio Alger he wasn’t.

  Scaife was also about winning by any means necessary. When I think back on his vast, relentless, and systematically funded enterprise, and its fueling of a doctrinaire, Manichean right-wing movement willing to do just about anything (including impeaching a president on partisan, made-up claims) to establish its political hegemony, the thing that still astonishes me the most is that, other than Hillary Clinton, nobody really believed he was doing it.

  When Hillary pointed a finger at “the vast right-wing conspiracy” for working to destroy her husband’s presidency back in the bad old impeachment days of 1998, people acted as if she had blamed the scandals on aliens from outer space or transmissions coming through Ken Starr’s teeth. Not only was the press largely ignorant of what was going on, though they were being manipulated, many Democrats and progressives didn’t really believe it either.

  Of course, unlike most cases in which one person warns a skeptical audience about the pernicious intentions of powerful unseen forces, Hillary wasn’t crazy. Hillary was right. There was, indeed, a vast right-wing conspiracy afoot in the 1990s. I know. I was part of it. And there is another one afoot today. The only difference is that, this time, the conspiracy is even vaster, and much smarter: more politically focused, more generously funded, more sophisticated in its approach. And, of course, thanks to Citizens United, it is not bound by much in the way of campaign finance laws.