It was inevitable. Fresh off of trying to bust the Writer's Guild union, Chris Lehane is moving on from that "success" to where he's always wanted to be - safe in the arms of his Republican pals.
With no end in sight to the state's flurry of ballot initiatives and the state likely to hold a special election this year, top Republican adviser Steve Schmidt and Democratic strategist Chris Lehane are among several California heavyweights forming a new firm solely designed to work on ballot-box campaigns.
Schmidt ran Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election drive, while Lehane worked in the Clinton White House and defeated a GOP attempt to change California's electoral college system.
The new firm, LFM Campaigns, also will include:
-- Democratic consultant Ace Smith, who was Hillary Clinton's California presidential campaign chairman and serves as an adviser to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a potential gubernatorial candidate
-- Republican strategist Adam Mendelsohn, adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the governor's former communications director
-- Mark Fabiani, Lehane's longtime business partner and a former communications aide to President Clinton
"If you look at the history of proposition work, the ones that have been most successful from a strategic perspective are those that have crossed party lines or have been seen as bipartisan," Lehane said.
There's a Murderer's Row of willing stooges.
And people wonder why the state is perpetually in crisis. With consultants like these...
Think about the timing, too. Right now, when ballot-box budgeting is crippling the state with unworkable burdens and all energies should be focused on untangling the structural traps that make the state ungovernable, Lehane and co. happily flit around, taking corporate money for "bipartisan" ballot measures that will do precisely the opposite.
The sickest thing is that these are the people Democratic lawmakers still think it makes sense to listen to. California Democratic Party money has poured into their pockets. The consultant class of hired guns in Sacramento may be the biggest contributor to the permanent crisis mode in which we find ourselves. Hope that "bipartisan" cash satisfies you while the state burns, fellas.
Just because it's never too early to get a campaign fix, here are a few items that amused, exasperated and provoked me the past few days.
• Topline political commentators still have no idea what they're talking about concerning Barbara Boxer's race for Senate in 2010. Chris Cillizza seems to think that Boxer is vulnerable to a challenge by Arnold Schwarzenegger. First of all, her approval ratings are BETTER than Arnold's. Second, there's no way he can win a Republican primary after having advocated for tax increases. His positions on health care reform and global warming and Prop. 8 don't help either, but in particular the tax position is untenable in a closed Republican primary. Chuck DeVore would slaughter him in a straight-up one-on-one matchup. The Yacht Party isn't going to line up behind Schwarzenegger. It's just not going to happen. And Arnold knows it, which is why he won't run.
• As for Schwarzenegger's successor, the great hope of the Republican Party, former eBay executive Meg Whitman, has already lost top political operatives Steve Schmidt and Adam Mendelsohn before she's even announced for the position. FAIL. Although, given Schmidt's performance on John McCain's campaign, I'm not sure you want his help. I think it's important for Democrats to make Schmidt absolute poison for any California Republican seeking to hire him.
• Meanwhile, Jerry Brown, angling for the Governor's office for a third term, is getting fund-raising help from Gray Davis. See above re: poison.
• Glenn Greenwald has been tracking Dianne Feinstein's presumed backpedaling and vagueness regarding torture and forcing all branches of government to comply with the Army Field Manual on interrogations. This bears a lot of watching. Feinstein's equivocations and turnarounds against her constituents are so perfunctory now as to be banal, but if she thinks she can get away with wavering on torture and still try to win votes, she's just flat wrong.
• This article at Swing State Project posits that Obama won 4 Congressional districts in California currently held by Republicans - Gallegly (CA-24); Dreier (CA-26); Bono-Mack (CA-45); Bilbray (CA-50). He bases this on assumptions from the county-level data, assumptions which I'm not sure can be made. Anecdotally, I heard Obama carried CA-48, so if anything the diarist may be undercounting this. Once all the data is received, we'll have a full report, but I find this too speculative to be worthy of comment.
ST. PAUL - It was what aides to Senator John McCain describe as probably the worst night of his campaign. As Senator Barack Obama claimed the Democratic nomination before a cheering sea of faces on national television, Mr. McCain countered with a lackluster speech in a half-empty hall, posed in front of a pea-green screen that became fodder for late-night comedy.
Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain who worked on President Bush's campaign in 2004, could barely hide his fury in the coming days, as he announced - to anyone who would listen - that he would personally make certain the McCain campaign would never again embarrass Mr. McCain.
"Fun Steve is dead," Mr. Schmidt said.
Unbeknown to NYT scribes Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg, fun lived on, in fact in far funnier terms just last Thursday as the McCain campaign embarrassed McCain even better -- during the largest audience of his career. Fun Steve made many laugh. According to Politicker CA the, "Democratic side of the California political blogosphere exploded with delight Friday afternoon as word of an embarrassing gaffe in Sen. John McCain's acceptance speech Thursday at the Republican National Convention spread."
(Why does the media hate Palin? That must be what it is! - promoted by Brian Leubitz)
When Steve Schmidt stopped working for Dick Cheney to come back to California and manage Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election, Carla Marinucci had a page B1 story on Schmidt which quoted Garry South as saying, "He's been sitting on Karl Rove's lap for the last five years." And Bob Mulholland offered, "This guy has Cheney tattoos all over him."
Yet by the time Schmidt went on to be the latest to take over John McCain's campaign, he seemed to be walking on water with the press. The story announcing the move, again by Carla Marinucci, appeared on the front page. This time, the first quote was from his business partner saying it was a "good move" followed by quotes from a Republican. Finally, a token Democrat was quoted as saying all Democrats "respect his ability." It was pure puff, no mention of him lying about taxes all through the gubernatorial campaign. No mention this time of his engineering of the Martha Alito crying stagecraft. No mention of the disarray in the McCain campaign. Just puff.
However, that relationship with the press went to hell the past few days.
So now, with the election over, it's time for our favorite unemployed journalist to say this:
A get out the vote operation is effective only on the margins. If you are in a close race, it can make the difference. This is why Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger raised $20 million for it, anticipating at the beginning of this year that he would be in a close race against a Democratic candidate. Which of course did not happen. The point is, unless a candidate is right there in the ballpark in a close race, GOTV doesn't make much difference. Aside from Schwarzenegger and new Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, the moderate Silicon Valley entrepreneur, California Republicans simply don't have many good candidates.
This, of course, comes two months after Bradley's long and glowing post about that same GOTV operation, called "Schwarzenegger's Secret Weapon," which couldn't be more fawning about the super-duper high-tech facility (complete with video evidence!) that will "turn out a vote not only for Schwarzenegger, but also for his ticket mates." This blowjob of an article practically gives the whole state to Republicans, and glorifies Arnold's campaign manager Steve Schmidt as the architect of the surefire GOP statewide resurgence. Now, suddenly, when it fails, it wasn't that important to begin with.
I'm telling you, there's no bigger tool in politics than this guy.
I want to take a second and write about Karl Rove. He is a seen as a savior of the right and is hated by the left. Some may ask though, this is a site about California politics why are you talking about a White House staffer?
The answer to that is simple. The Republican party, from the top to the bottom is controlled and dictated by Rove. From the phone jamming in New Hampshire, to the tampering of machines and manufacturing of lines in Ohio to voter fraud here in California is all orchestrated by the man that holds significant power in the George W. Bush White House. In fact protégés of Karl Rove, Steve Schmidt, Matthew Dowd and gang have all been brought in to run the Ahnold campaign.
James Moore and Wayne Slater, two reporters for the Dallas Morning News, who know Rove quite well from his days in Texas wrote the best selling book Bush’s Brain. They have now come out with a new book titled “The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power.”
According to Publishers Weekly (hat tip: TG at Political Wire) this book is a "bold follow-up to journalists Moore and Slater's bestseller, Bush's Brain, takes a provocative look at how Karl Rove used George Bush's various campaigns and presidency to engineer nothing less than the assertion of a long-term Republican hegemony and the complete dismantling of the Democratic Party."
The argument that Rove is a danger to democracy is not an argument that will sell on a mass level, but it is a reminder of what we are working against and should prove as motivation to stay active, strong and willing to fight to November.
Arnold wants to win re-election and will do just about anything to do so. Just look at who he hired to run his campaign, the Bush/Cheney team who managed turn a war hero into a flip-flopper and an draft dodger into a tough leader. The Merc does a great job profiling these imports and their hardball tactics.
Today's California News Roundup is on the flip. Teasers: Schmidt spins, Salmon season chopped, immigration mess, telco infrastructure in California, Angelides interviewed.
Today's news roundup on the flip. Teasers: Piggy banks at the trough, the profitability of being a Rovian acolyte, employment up, housing down, gas prices up, and minor skirmishes in the culture war.
