White House: If Not Hillary...

You may have seen the recent New York Times magazine story on former Virginia governor Mark Warner. The cover portrait of Warner won’t work as a campaign poster. Due to a film process that caused colors to shift (editors later explained) Warner’s jacket was charcoal, not maroon, and his shirt light blue, not pink. Even the color of his eyes was wrong. Never mind. The thrust of the story was that here is a Democratic presidential hopeful who in the 2008 elections can turn red states blue, the only color-shifting Dems care about.

Some complain Warner’s only foreign policy experience is dealing with Salvadorn immigrants in northern Virginia. Others ask where he stands on divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Then there’s national security – in recent elections the bete noire for Democrats. But that may be changing. The greatest threat to national security is incompetence, as demonstrated at home and abroad by the Bush administration, from mismanagement of the war in Iraq to unprotected ports in the U.S.

Hillary Clinton is the odds-on favorite for the `08 Democratic nomination. I don’t buy the “Hillary can’t win” notion, because she has both the moxie and experience to turn back what is sure to be the most toxic and virulent GOP campaign in the muddied history of American politics. But for worried Democrats looking at alternative candidates in an election year when voters are simply begging for a competent government that won’t bankrupt their grandchildren, Warner is worth a look.

In Virginia, governors are limited to one term, which means the day you take office you’re a lame-duck, with no leverage and no future. In 2002, Warner succeeded Republican Governor Jim Gilmore who left him with a $6 billion deficit and a fractious Republican legislature chanting the party mantra of “no new taxes”. With all that working against him, Warner brought warring factions together, eliminated the deficit and convinced the legislature to approve a $1.5 billion tax increase. Governing magazine described Virginia as “the best managed state in the nation” and Warner left office with an 80% approval rating.

All this has relevance at a time when the country has a $9 trillion deficit and a Congress where Democrats have no voice and Republicans speak mostly to grand juries.

Americans are desperate for a president who can govern, who can bring bi-partisan solutions to real problems, whose priorities aren’t political favors but address the concerns of ordinary citizens—outsourcing of jobs, affordable health care, good schools for their kids. When it comes to the big issues, competence trumps flag-waving posturing every time. What is more important than reining in deficit spending, finding funds to repair and maintain an ignored infrastructure so that our highways and bridges don’t collapse? We want a competent government that can build levees that keep out the flood waters and an efficient FEMA for emergency response when they don’t. Warner has the credentials to do that.

Warner really is a “uniter, not a divider” though voters never again want to hear that as a campaign slogan.

He is a businessman who didn’t require fixed bids or daddy’s rich friends to become a success. He did it on his own. While George W was digging dry holes in southwest Texas, Warner was proving his smarts and investment acumen in the high tech world. He made his fortune as co-founder of Nextel, as well as Capital Cellular Corporation.

Can you hear me now?

Negative ads: What do pointy-headed academics know about politics?

Ten years after publication, I had no idea my book on negative advertising had so perfectly captured the political scene. Yet, in the second paragraph of his Washington Post review of Dr. John Geer’s new book, In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns, Dan Balz writes: “Geer, a Vanderbilt University political scientist, has set out to challenge the widely held belief that attack ads and negative campaigns are destroying democracy.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself, because, of course, I did say it myself. Balz’ dead-on premise was the second half of the title of my 2003 book: Poison Politics: Are Negative Campaigns Destroying Democracy?

Are negative ads destroying democracy? Of course they are—the evidence is everywhere in the debris of a Constitutionally-challenged Bush administration. We have this corrupt government because negative ads misled the American people. John Kerry was Swift-boated out of the Presidency, allowing George W. Bush four more years of illegal wiretaps and other catastrophic damage to our country. Dr. Geer surveys the ruins and insists negativity is good for the political system.

He confirms that negativity is on the rise and that the 2004 campaign was the most negative in the past four decades. But he claims that “any effort to lessen negative advertising will lessen the quality of information available to the public.”

To properly refute these academic ramblings, you’ll probably want to read my book (still available in paperback) while keeping your TV viewing as far removed from Fox News as possible. I wrote Poison Politics prior to the Swift-boat outrage but in the wake of Saxby Chambliss’ 2002 attack on the patriotism of Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated veteran and triple amputee. That those ads made it possible for Chambliss, who didn’t go to Vietnam (said he had a bad knee), to defeat Cleland, and for Bush, who declined to go to Vietnam, to defeat Kerry, is evidence our democracy has been severely damaged and that Dr. Geer has a screw loose.

A brief update: Rather than being driven into disgrace, John O’Neill, co-founder of the Swift boat ads, is now attacking the patriotism of Rep. Bernie Sanders in Vermont. You can expect to see O’Neill any evening on The O’Reilly Factor or Hannity and Colmes. Maybe Dr. Geer will join them.

White House: Don't cry over Rove

Often called “Bush’s brain” (how insulting is that?) Karl Rove has long been the indispensable man to the Republican faithful. He has been to Bush what steroids were to Barry Bonds, what Tom DeLay is to gerrymandering, what Jack Abramoff is to public service. So it’s understandable the fear and trembling that runs through GOP ranks every time the grand jury meets. With a tough mid-term election coming up, how can they survive without their master of deceit and deception?

My advice is: don’t sweat it. Rove won’t be that big a loss. Not after six years in the White House. Trying to contain and explain the gaffes and excesses of this administration have taken its toll. Rove is like an aging big-league pitcher (think Randy Johnson) who has lost something off his fast ball and can’t get anybody out any more.

If you don’t think Rove is slipping, then you just haven’t been paying attention.

You can’t really blame Rove for Bill Frist’s looney idea of a $100 gasoline rebate as the solution to high gas prices. But GOP “health week” was surely Rove, and the “miracle cure” they pushed was a Senate bill that would enrich insurance agencies while gutting state regulations protecting consumers. Plop plop, fizz, fizz. Republicans were fortunate it died on the shelf.

They weren’t so lucky with the $70 billion tax cut—it passed. There were high-fives in the White House over that one, particularly since they also managed to exclude from the bill a $5 billion tax increase on oil companies. (Let’s see now Karl, just how is this $70 billion tax cut gonna play going into an election where 99% of the people who vote get nothing?) Even the New York Daily News, a publication that has been Fox-like in its adoration of everything Bush, wrote an editorial headlined “Bush’s Gift to the Rich”. Cutting taxes at a time of soaring budget deficits even gagged some Republicans. Sen. Voinovich of Ohio said bitterly “if we were responsible, we’d go to the American people and ask them for a tax increase to pay for the cost of the war.”

Between grand jury appearances, Rove assures Republican audiences he is absolutely confident the party will do well in the mid-term elections. Karl, do you have any idea how bad it really is? You have an incumbent Congressman in rosy-red North Carolina who is losing to Heath Shuler! If a carpetbagger from Tennessee and the worst draft choice in Washington Redskin history can beat your guy in the south, you’ve got problems.

In the past when all else fails (gay marriage, flag burning amendments), Rove’s trump card is to focus attention on the President’s personal popularity. That was then. This is now. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Rove still thinks Bush’s folksy down-home demeanor will save him. Which shows how Rove is losing it. The old savvy Rove fooled others, but never himself. Yet here he is sounding like a member of Bush’s pre-screened audiences, insisting “people like him, they respect him.” Get a grip, Karl. It’s over. Even conservatives are jumping ship while historians rush books to publishers about our worst President ever. The 29% of the people in the polls who approve of him either work for the administration or have relatives at Halliburton.

Face it Karl. This mid-term election is going to make 1994 look like a minor adjustment. Not only is Heath Shuler going to trounce Charley Taylor in North Carolina, but voter outrage will trigger a Democratic tsunami that throws all the bums out.

Former New York Sen. Alfonse d’Amato-- who helped lead the 1994 uprising—recently had some good advice for Rove and his party. “They say that prayer is powerful. This is a time when Republicans should be doing a lot of praying.”

Think about it Karl. Minimum-security might look pretty good compared to the chaos Republicans will endure over the remaining Bush years.

Senate Race: Dive, Dive, Dive

Oh to have been a fly on the wall in the Katherine Harris U.S. Senate campaign!

There are only two reasons political consultants abandon campaigns: the candidate is broke, or a total jerk whose reputation will take theirs down with them.

So you connect the dots:

Harris, the Congresswoman who as Florida Secretary of State kept enough Democrats off the voting rolls to deliver the 2000 Presidential election to her governor’s brother, has more staff turnover than Wal-Mart.

Here’s a candidate who put up $10 million of her own money to challenge incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, and all of her top advisers quit. Chief among them was Ed Rollins, one of the most experienced and controversial GOP operatives, famed for leading Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” re-election campaign and making Ross Perot a legitimate third-party Presidential candidate in 1992—good enough to insure Bill Clinton’s victory over George the One.

Ed is a delightful guy who goes on record with remarks most political consultants save for closing time at the hotel bar.

As a member of the consulting tribe, I can tell you that Ed spoke for all of us when he said “you can fool all the people all the time if the advertising budget is big enough.”

He was at the top of his game when he helped mastermind Christine Todd Whitman’s election as New Jersey governor in 1992. Then he opened his big mouth at a breakfast debriefing of two-dozen top reporters to claim he won the campaign by depressing the black vote. Rollins later recanted the story, but too late – it had sparked not only Republican outrage but a federal grand jury investigation.

Ed returned to the campaign wars in 1994 to run Michael Huffington’s Senate campaign in California, an experience he later described this way: “In three decades as a political junkie, I never worked a more miserable, depressing, or rotten race.”

Until now.

It is a tribute to the utter awfulness of the Harris campaign that even with 10 million bucks on the line, Ed Rollins just walked away.