Category: Politics

In a brief telephone interview Thursday night, Herman Cain presidential campaign chief of staff Mark Block discussed the campaign’s strategy, fund-raising and recent news developments. Block contacted me after I’d written a post about the many criticisms leveled at the campaign by conservatives, including bloggers who demanded that Block be fired from the campaign. My recording of the interview began after Block had told me he was taking a cigarette break. — RSM

Robert Stacy McCain: Hang on, hang on a second. I’ve got to step outside myself and have a smoke.
Mark Block: Smokers unite!

RSM: What happened was, I saw all the bloggers calling for your lynching and I said, look, you know, I can bitch about this campaign from a much more informed perspective than anybody else could ever bitch about this campaign. You know what I’m saying?
BLOCK: Yep.

RSM: And so these amateurs jumping in on ‘Oh, what’s wrong with the Cain campaign’ kind of pissed me off. And so I said, ‘OK, I’ll uncork one and when it’s all said and done, guess what? They just raised $9 million, they’re on top of the polls, nobody ever thought they’d ever be there — you want to recalibrate your criticism?’
BLOCK: You know, Stacy, and I’m not blowing smoke up your ass –- no pun intended — but you’re one of the few that get that this is a non-traditional campaign.
Does Block make mistakes? Of course! You know, one of the reasons is we don’t have an army of researchers and analysts telling us what we can and cannot say and how to say it, OK? I don’t have a whole slew of lawyers that I go to and say, ‘You know what, because I say this thing about this kid that works for Politico and his mother, double-check the facts.’ I get handed a piece of paper and it says that he works at Politico, they broke the story, same last name of this woman, connect the dots — I was wrong! I admitted I was wrong, all right?
Now, with all of those faults, though, Stacy, we run a million miles an hour. And you know what? We make mistakes. But they can’t catch us.

RSM: Well, you know, I defended the ‘Blame Perry’ move as strategic genius. And whether or not it was intentional or not, you know, even your mistakes help you.
BLOCK: No, no — I will not back off of the Perry thing, Stacy. I will say that I was wrong on the kid that worked for Politico, because we didn’t have our facts straight. I’m not backing off on the Perry thing. I backed off on the guy [consultant Curt Anderson], because he came out and said that it wasn’t him. But I’m still not backing off that the pot wasn’t stirred by the Perry folks.

RSM: Well, between you and me and the fencepost [discussion involving confidential sources, redacted] and we’ll never know where this shit came from, except that my hunch from the get-go was Perry. But if it was the Obama people, so what? If it was Romney, so what? You know, that doesn’t matter, really.
BLOCK: Yeah, you know what? It’ll probably be like Deep Throat. We probably won’t know for 25 years where the whole Politico thing came from.

RSM: Yeah. Well, now, $9.4 million [fundraising since Oct. 1] is the number I just heard?
BLOCK: It was over $9 million.

RSM: In 40 days?
BLOCK: Yep.

RSM: Which is $225,000 a day.
BLOCK: It doesn’t take a simple regression analysis to figure that one out, does it?

RSM: No. So, what’s your burn rate? Is it still low? I mean, are you piling this money up?
BLOCK: Yep. . . . This is something that you got, that the other ones didn’t get. We got a lot of criticism from you and others, early on — really, going into the Florida straw poll –because we didn’t have a massive staff in every state and we didn’t have a massive staff in Atlanta. And we didn’t have this and we didn’t have that and we didn’t have all this other stuff. Right?

RSM: Right.
BLOCK: Because we didn’t want to burn that cash. So we come out of the Florida straw poll with extremely low fixed costs. If I’m talking like a businessman, it’s because he runs it like a business. So our burn rate is small, compared to all of the other campaigns, because we don’t have a lot of fixed overhead. So now, as the cash comes in, right, I don’t have a lot of bills to pay, Stacy.

RSM: OK. So let me ask you something — and someone had told me about this — is that you guys sent [field director] Jamie Brazil down to Florida before that straw poll to reach out to people and, like the list of [Republican] contacts in the state would have cost $7,000, and y’all didn’t spend the $7,000, and he did it all on his own. Is that true?
BLOCK: That’s true, but you gotta remember, Stacy, how many dozens of trips that Mr. Cain made into Florida prior to the Florida straw poll and all the Tea Party groups that he spoke at their rallies, OK? We had built an infrastructure down there. When you and I were out in Maryland [in July] in the driveway of, I can’t even remember whose house it was, and I said, ‘Stacy, we built these infrastructures in these states.’

RSM: Yep.
BLOCK: Through the Tea Party movement. I remember going into, for God’s sake, Fargo, North Dakota, in February or March, freezing my butt off, and the first people we met was the Tea Party groups, the 9/12-ers, the grassroots organizations. This is why I say that we’re running a million miles an hour — they can’t catch us, Stacy, ‘cause you can’t build those infrastructures overnight.

RSM: Yeah, well, speaking of building things overnight, I got a little note back from a friend who says y’all may be rolling out your new Web site [Friday].
BLOCK: Yeah.

RSM: Which was my big beef.
BLOCK: Yeah.

RSM: So, you’re re-launching the site tomorrow with a new design?
BLOCK: Yes, and you know, I have been so busy the last 10 days that I’m 99.9 percent sure that we’re rolling it out tomorrow, because we’re rolling it out on Veteran’s Day — tomorrow’s Veteran’s Day — but I haven’t had even a chance to call the developers and say, ‘What time are you flipping the switch?’

RSM: Yeah.
BLOCK: And I’ll try to do that tonight and send you a text message.

* * * * * *

UPDATE: Linked by Rio Norte Line, Matt Lewis, Hot Air Headlines, and by Bryan Preston at PJ Tatler. Now a Memeorandum thread.

Everybody seems so judgmental today, eh? People don’t pay me to teach campaign ethics. They pay me to get the story. I’m like the sportswriter in the press box. And like Al Davis said, “Just win, baby.”

For the past several days, in conversation after conversation, I’ve listened while friends told me what’s wrong with the Herman Cain campaign. Some of these friends are enthusiastic Cain supporters, some are not. And as I told several people who criticized the campaign’s handling of the sexual harassment allegations, “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. Any 24-year-old with a semester of Leadership Institute training could do a better job than they’ve been doing.”

Look, I’m no campaign strategist. But you don’t have to be a campaign strategist to see that, for example, HermanCain.com is without question The World’s Suckiest Campaign Web Site.

Just in terms of doing my job I noticed this months ago, because when you click the “Newsroom” tab on the site, a reporter might expect to find an archive of press releases. What you find instead is some kind of 1996-era “frames” format with out-of-date news articles about the campaign — which doesn’t even include links to the original articles.

OK, so click the “Press Resources” link at HermanCain.com and we find — wait for it — a form you can fill out and request information.

Fill it out. Maybe they’ll get back to you.

If I were the manager of a campaign paying good money for a Web site and somebody provided me with a useless piece of crap like HermanCain.com, either I’d be in jail for attempted murder or else he’d be in jail under indictment for fraud and theft by deception.

There is no excuse for this. I could pick up my cell-phone this very minute and, just from the numbers in my speed-dail, give you the names of six professionals who could design a better Web site than HermanCain.com. Five months ago, Steve Foley of Citizens4Cain published an open letter to the Cain campaign telling them what a wreck their Web site is and . . . no response. 

Nobody home. Nobody cares. Crickets chirping.

When the campaign has failed to fix a blindingly obvious and basic problem like that, months after they’ve been told about the problem, it does not inspire confidence. And this kind of problem — which can be seen by anybody who cares to look — is replicated throughout the Cain campaign’s operations.

People with years of experience in the campaign business keep talking my ears off, telling me stuff the Cain campaign is doing wrong, and I don’t know what to tell them, except that they’re telling me the umpteenth version of the same story I’ve been hearing from everybody else. If I had any influence at all with the campaign, they’d have long ago re-hired Dan Tripp and given him two orders: Kick ass and take names. They’re not listening to me, they’re not listening to Steve Foley, they’re not listening to anybody, and so all I can do is to do my job — I’m a journalist, not a campaign strategist — and try not to worry about it.

The reason I wrote that 500-word rant is because today I noticed bloggers demanding that Herman Cain fire his chief of staff Mark Block:

Herman Cain’s Worst Enemy
— Michelle Malkin

Dear Herman Cain
— Erick Erickson

Cain campaign: We’re sticking with Mark Block
— Ed Morrissey

In Erickson’s post, he writes:

Herman, you said you’d surround yourself with the best people and you’ve surrounded yourself with Class A failures. The problems you are facing are problems of campaign staffing. You’ve failed to live up to your own standard of hiring the best people. 

Which is pretty damned categorical, and which might have more credibility if Erickson’s buddies — “the best people” — weren’t the guys piloting the hopelessly doomed Rick Perry campaign.

Malkin’s complaint, basically, is that Mark Block is a lying scumbag. Having spent a good deal of time covering Republican campaigns, however, I’m willing to attest that “lying scumbag” and “GOP political operative” are pretty much synonymous. The key thing is to hire effective lying scumbags, and the “Blame Rick Perry” move was pure genius. For two or three days, everybody was screaming bloody murder about Block trying to pin the blame on Curt Anderson, which bought Team Herman enough time to come up with a better story.

Guess what? It worked.

But if you’re a conservative who wants to get quoted in the mainstream media this week, hurry up and denounce Mark Block:

Cain chief of staff under fire
Conservative pundits and former Cain staffers are calling for the resignation of Herman Cain’s chief of staff, who they say has damaged the GOP candidate’s credibility.
The calls for Mark Block to resign come as Cain’s campaign deals with sexual harassment allegations that threaten to ruin his candidacy. . . .
“Mark Block has to go,” prominent conservative blogger Ed Morrisey of Hot Air wrote Wednesday morning. “If he’s not gone by tomorrow, no one will take this campaign seriously again — nor should they.”

No expertise is required to identify and criticize the Cain campaign’s errors. Everybody with two eyes and a brain can see it. And yet . . .

Cain’s fundraising surges past $9 million
Herman Cain has raised more than $9 million since Oct. 1, his campaign announced Thursday, more than doubling his cash haul for 2012.
More than $2 million of that total was donated within the last 10 days, as Cain battled mounting allegations of sexual harassment from his time as president of the National Restaurant Association.
Cain only raised $4.7 million from May through Sept. 30, although it was not until his Sept. 24 victory in the Florida straw poll that the candidate began to rise in Republican polls. The campaign has now raised a total of $14.1 million. . . .

For the past 40 days, while the Cain campaign has broken every single maxim of Political Communications 101, they’ve been raising money at the pace of $225,000 a day. If that’s failure, it’s the kind of failure many campaign operatives would kill to have.

Despite everything, Herman Cain is No. 1 in the polls. 

And next time I see Mark Block, I expect him to buy me a beer for calling him an “effective lying scumbag.”

Obviously, it was intended as a compliment.

UPDATE: Someone sent me this:

Free “Beat Obama With A Cain” Ringtone
From your phone:
1. Dial 90210
2. In the text box type in beat Obama.
3. Click Send
4. You’ll need a smart phone and will be sent a link to which they click on and a screen will appear with a choice to download an mp4 or an mp3.

Don’t have a “smart phone,” so I haven’t had a chance to try this. Let me know how it works.

UPDATE II: The proverbial “sources close to the campaign” tell me they’re preparing to roll out a new campaign Web site. Let’s hope it has an archive of press releases, with permalinks.