Takeover (31 page)

It is the old joke about asking a candidate, “When did you stop beating your spouse?” turned into “Why do you want to starve poor people by sending food stamp programs back to the states?”

Democrats never buy into the idea that a “debate” is a nonpartisan affair.

In 2008, under pressure from liberal groups and blogs, Nevada Democrats decided to cancel a debate to be hosted in part by Fox News.

Liberal bloggers and groups, as well as some Nevada Democrats, had demanded that Fox be removed as a sponsor, arguing that its coverage was slanted toward Republicans.

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, one of the most popular liberal blogs, began polling the Democratic 2008 presidential field to see who would attend the debate, and of course to intimidate them into not attending. Additionally, liberal activist group
MoveOn.org
collected more than 250,000 signatures, demanding that Fox be dropped as a sponsor.

According to the
New York Times
, “In response to the query from Mr. Moulitsas, John Edwards said he would not participate. His campaign cited Fox as a factor, as well as a heavy schedule.” Moulitsas later reported that Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who previously said he would attend, had decided against it. Nevada Democratic leaders, attempting to salvage what they hoped would be a good opportunity to reach a new group of voters, offered a compromise in which an affiliate of liberal (and now defunct) radio network Air America would also broadcast the debate and promised a “progressive” voice would be added to the panel of moderators.

All to no avail; the pressure from the liberal activists was too strong and the debate was canceled.

Any Republican candidate who is smart enough to be president ought to be smart enough to see that the way to defeat the Democrats is to stop letting liberals like George Stephanopoulos, Anderson Cooper, James Lehrer, Martha Raddatz, Candy Crowley, and Robert Schieffer set the agenda through these debates, and instead only participate in debates with fair, objective journalists as moderators.

But the problem isn’t so much the Republican presidential candidates as it is the establishment Republicans on the Commission on Presidential Debates and the leadership of the Republican National Committee who are not innocent bystanders.

More reflective of the establishment Republican Party of 1987 when the commission was set up, and the DC Republican establishment, than it is of today’s more conservative GOP, the Republicans on the Commission are all too ready to cede the role of debate moderator and agenda setter to the establishment media elite they meet at Georgetown salons.

That’s how, even in the face of decades of proof that establishment journalism has a hard Left tilt, we always end up with liberal debate moderators like 2012’s group: Lehrer, Stephanopoulos, Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper, Candy Crowley, and Robert Schieffer.

The bad news for future Republican candidates who go along with playing the Party of Stupid is that since Lehrer was hammered by his fellow liberals for not being an aggressive moderator, they can expect the moderators of the 2016 debates to avoid the pounding Lehrer took by doing their best to help the Democratic candidate—particularly if that candidate is Hillary Clinton.

Martha Raddatz, who moderated the vice presidential debate in 2012, is a fawning member of the Washington liberal sisterhood that has promoted and supported Hillary Clinton since the day she arrived in DC back in 1993. Raddatz has deep ties to the old-line liberal media and to Washington’s Democratic establishment, having been married to the son of Washington’s ultimate establishment liberal, longtime
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee, and later to Obama’s FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski.

Candy Crowley, chief political correspondent for CNN, is likewise a longtime member of Washington’s liberal sisterhood, who said during the 2008 campaign cycle she brought her daughter to see Hillary Clinton, “you know, because I think this might be history.”

But this is the treatment the equally historic candidacy of Republican Michele Bachmann received from Crowley:

We have a poll where the majority of Americans said you all need to compromise on this debt ceiling, you all need to raise the debt ceiling, and the deal ought to include a combination of
tax increases and spending cuts. You are opposed to both raising the debt ceiling and that kind of compromise. So doesn’t that put you outside the mainstream?
⁹

CBS News anchor and
Face the Nation
host Bob Schieffer may not be quite equal to Lehrer in stature among the old-time Washington journalism establishment, but he is second to none in promoting the liberal agenda in the media—especially the liberal fable that Republicans must “move to the center” to win a national election. At least twice in the month leading up to the 2012 debate he moderated, Schieffer called upon Mitt Romney to renounce the conservative agenda and to say he was a moderate.

“Do you think that Mitt Romney’s got to move a little bit more toward the center here as we come toward the election?” Schieffer asked a guest on
Face the Nation
. Fortunately for Romney, that guest was Newt Gingrich, who forcefully rebuffed the suggestion by saying, “No, I think Mitt Romney has to move to clarity in drawing the contrast between the two futures.”
¹⁰

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich participated in a Lincoln-Douglas–style debate hosted by the Texas Patriots PAC. There was no moderator, and the two candidates discussed and responded to each other’s positions on domestic policy during an event in The Woodlands, Texas.
¹¹

The Cain–Gingrich Debate 2011 showed that, without the interference of the establishment media, the candidates can have an interesting and instructive discussion on the issues and that Republicans have a host of thoughtful ideas about how to deal with the challenges facing America. The best thing Republican candidates could do to get those ideas out is to stop participating in the TV ratings games that pass for presidential debates—especially during Republican primaries.

The one 2012 Republican presidential candidate who seemed to actually be helped by the debate format was Newt Gingrich—and
Newt worked the debates to his advantage by confronting the media, not his fellow Republican candidates, for the nomination.

Were one to judge the debates strictly on “applause-ometer” results, Newt Gingrich was usually the runaway winner when he took the moderators to task for highlighting petty differences between the candidates in lieu of focusing on the real issues facing the country.

During the debate at the Reagan Library, Gingrich said to moderator John Harris of
Politico
, “I for one … hope that all of my friends up here are going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get Republicans to fight each other, to protect Barack Obama, who deserves to be defeated. And all of us are committed as a team. Whoever the nominee is, we are all for defeating Barack Obama.” He got most of the audience out of their chairs.

To many Tea Party and conservative activists, Gingrich was the winner of the 2012 Republican primary season debate marathon because he was the candidate who best challenged the conventional wisdom of the liberals asking the questions.

So, note to future Republican candidates for president: the liberals on the media panel of the presidential debates during the primary and general elections think they are the smartest people in the room, and that it is their job to make you look like an idiot or a woman-hating Neanderthal.

Imagine a debate between the Democratic candidates for president in which Britt Hume, Megyn Kelly, George F. Will, Steven Hayes, and Michael Barone asked the questions.

Such a debate will never happen because the Democrats don’t feel the need to pretend that conservative journalists and commentators are “nonpartisan” or to pander to the conservative media the way establishment Republicans feel compelled to pander to the national media.

National Republicans are all too willing to be the Party of Stupid when it comes to dealing with the establishment media. They rarely challenge the conventional wisdom behind media policy questions and are all too willing to let themselves be boxed in to answer questions
solely intended to drive a wedge between voters and Republican candidates. These so-called journalists want to drive voters away from Republican candidates, not actually conduct a “debate” about conservative principles.

The result in 2012 was, they let the liberal media all but choose Mitt Romney as their presidential nominee, with predictably disastrous results.

If there’s one lesson even the Party of Stupid could take away from the 2012 Republican primary debates, it is that media will look favorably on, promote, and highlight the most liberal or most progressive Republican capable of winning the nomination, then turn on that candidate in the general election.

If conservatives are to win and govern America, one of the things the GOP needs to do is to walk away from the self-perpetuating Commission on Presidential Debates. This undemocratic organization won’t even identify its sources of funding, and its staff is dominated by liberal Washington insiders, such as executive director Janet Brown. The next Republican presidential candidate should deal directly with his or her Democratic counterpart and cut out the Commission, which has been putting its thumb on the scale in favor of DC insiders for more than twenty-five years.

I
t says a lot about the caliber of advice Mitt Romney was getting in 2012 that in the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with unemployment at 7.9 percent in October 2012, and 12.3 million people unemployed (40.6 percent of whom were unemployed for more than six months), Romney ended up losing the presidential campaign by almost five million votes.

The same goes for the establishment Big Government Republican Senate candidates who lost in 2012. Heather Wilson in New Mexico, Rick Berg in North Dakota, Denny Rehberg in Montana, Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, George Allen in Virginia, Connie Mack in Florida, and Linda Lingle in Hawaii—were all defeated in a year when the Senate, under the leadership of Democrat Harry Reid, hadn’t passed a budget in over three years.

A big part of the problem was and is, in a word, consultants, especially the small coterie of Washington, DC–based Republican insiders that have come to dominate Republican political strategy and ad making over the past two decades.

The great strength of the Republican Party has always been its grassroots conservative base—the entrepreneurs, small business people,
farmers, and working families of Main Street America who donate to candidates, volunteer to knock on doors, make phone calls, and stamp envelopes every election cycle to elect conservatives to office.

These individuals aren’t involved in politics for personal gain—they are involved out of a sense of patriotism and because they want to, as Ronald Reagan said, “preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth.”

This growing class of professional political consultants and self-anointed political “strategists” that has come to dominate the management of Republican political campaigns over the past two decades generally opts for content-free campaigns instead of campaigns based on conservative ideas and ideology—naturally they want their clients to win, but in their hands politics is all too often reduced to a business, not a clash of ideas.

One of my first negative experiences with so-called professional political strategists came during a campaign that led to the defeat of California’s liberal Republican US senator Tommy Kuchel, the US Senate’s Republican minority whip, by the relatively unknown conservative Max Rafferty.

As I noted earlier, Max Rafferty chose my firm, and our expertise in the new and alternative media of direct mail, to get his conservative message out to California’s Republican primary voters.

We mailed twice to two million registered Republican voter households in California. I’m confident that the over four million letters we mailed to reach about seven million people in California was the major reason a relatively unknown state superintendent of public instruction with little campaign money was able to beat one of California’s best known and most powerful politicians by sixty-seven thousand votes.

However, when the November general election came around, Rafferty’s consultants decided they didn’t want a big direct-mail effort; they asked us to mail only to sixty thousand Rafferty contributors and probably used the money our letters raised mostly to buy TV advertisements.

While that wasn’t the only reason Rafferty lost badly in November, I think it certainly was one of the principal reasons. I’m sure the fact that consultants receive a hefty commission for placing TV advertising had nothing to do with the decision to use expensive, and largely ineffective, TV ads instead of the new and alternative media and grassroots voter contact techniques to promote Rafferty’s insurgent campaign.

These professional political operatives (particularly the inside-the-Beltway crowd) aren’t interested in building a great grassroots conservative movement to back Republican candidates who will reduce the size of government and govern America according to conservative principles—the economic incentives being what they are, they concentrate on those techniques that pay rather than build the grassroots base of the Republican Party.

Think this assessment is too harsh?

Morton Blackwell, the principled conservative Republican national committeeman from Virginia, founder of the Leadership Institute and an expert in campaign management, made these observations in a column for the
Daily Caller
a few weeks after the 2012 election.

Most consultants take a 15 percent commission (over and above client-paid production costs and his retainer) from media vendors for all placements.

The consultant knows he gets no commission for campaign funds spent on people-intensive activity, such as: