LIVE AT FIVE – 11.11.11

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.”

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain

Crowder: ‘They Hate Capitalism. But They Love Weed‘

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Steven Crowder is slightly more serious in his Fox News contributor role. Here, he is trying to point out that opposition to Wall Street fat cats is a point of common ground between Tea Parties and #OWS.
The fact Crowder brings up about union contributions over time is new to me. Have we hated unions enough? Again, private sector unions are no more, or less, evil than corporations, with the difference being that unions don’t exactly produce anything.

Category: Blogging

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 60 Comments

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.

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain

It’s Morning in Vanuatu Again

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 23 Comments

Is Perry Toast?
— New York Times

PERRY DEBATE DISASTER: This Is The Moment
That Officially Killed His Campaign — For Good
— Business Insider

Ford. Quayle. Stockdale. Now, Poor Rick Perry
— The Atlantic

Cain escapes serious damage
in Republican debate
— Reuters

Kraushaar won’t do news conference
without other accusers
— CNN

Investigator: Herman Cain
innocent of sexual advances
— WGCL-TV, CBS Atlanta

82 Reasons to Visit Vanuatu
— Sydney Morning Herald

Mrs. Other McCain and I had a . . . discussion about the budget this morning. I’m sitting here looking at the receipt for the rental car I recently returned to Enterprise: $854.46.

Recall that I rented the car to attend the Oct. 29 “Turning the Tides” conference in Annapolis, expecting to return it afterwards. But then Politico broke the sexual harassment story on Oct. 30, which made Herman Cain’s Oct. 31 appearance at the National Press Club a major event I couldn’t miss, so I kept the car to go cover that. By Tuesday, when the Cain “scandal” reached crisis stage, I had to go to the American Spectator gala, after which it was only two days until the start of the Americans for Prosperity “Defending the American Dream” Summit, and switching to the weekly rate made sense. So then I went down to D.C. and found myself unexpectedly in the middle of the Occupy DC riot. By the time I finally returned the car, I’d had it for 11 days and . . . $854.46.

My transportation situation has been a cause of continuous stress, not to mention a disastrous financial drain, ever since that damned deer totalled the KIA last September. My 19-year-old son James has replaced the busted radiator, straightened the frame and gotten the basic body work done, but the car (on which we’re still making payments, of course) remains parked and awaiting the final repairs necessary to pass Maryland inspection, at which point we’ll have to pay to get the tags, insurance, etc.

James is now in his first semester of college, working when he’s not studying and, in whatever spare moments he has, wrapped up in the slender arms of his lovely brunette girlfriend, Danielle. Getting the KIA roadworthy again is therefore not likely to happen anytime soon, and I blame myself, if only because my sons inherited the legendary animal magnetism. Mea culpa.

However, there is a foreign policy debate Saturday in Spartanburg, S.C., and my friend Ali Akbar has arranged for me to get media credentials, so now I’m planning to rent another car tomorrow and drive down there: 475 miles one-way, a 950-mile round trip, 16 hours on the road and I hope, in consideration of this extraordinary effort, maybe my good friends with the Cain campaign will grant me something in the way of access to the candidate. Read more

Category: American Spectator, Election 2012, Fear and Loathing in Spartanburg, Herman Cain, Shoe Leather Fund, Vanuatu

Jerry Sandusky Is To Joe Paterno As. . .

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 22 Comments

by Smitty

. . .Eric Holder is to. . .

They told me that if I voted for John McCain, executive accountability would be for the little people. So far, they’ve been proven quite correct, no thanks whatsoever to that craven sack of a Senator from Nevada.

Just to belabor the point here, this post is not equating professional incompetence with being a sex offender. The point, rather, is directed at those in charge of the ones living in infamy.

Via Iowahawk on Twitter: as for Sandusky, may God have mercy on your blighted soul, sir. And justice be done. As a newly-minted father, I would really have to pray hard for the Almighty to deliver enough mercy to cover you, if the half of the rumors are true. So let them be false rumors, or, if true, let justice be served.

I’ve heard some say there are humans that “need killin'”.

Update: linked at The POH Diaries, with a picture of Sandusky.

Category: Barack Obama, Democrats, Eric Holder, Pennsylvania

Well-Informed Customers Are Well-Armed Customers

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Freakonomics discusses an NYU mashup that maps out subsidized housing:

As the article makes clear, this database performs a variety of worthwhile functions — allowing renters or buyers to locate affordable housing; letting affordable-housing advocates keep track of when subsidized buildings are scheduled to potentially lose their subsidized status; etc.
There’s one potential function the article didn’t mention, however. Am I a cynic (or a jerk, or maybe just a realist) for thinking that this database will also be used by renters and homebuyers eager to avoid neighborhoods that have a lot of subsidized housing?

It would be unsurprising, after a time, that if the application gains traction it drives the property values toward an inverted bell-curve. You’d think you’d go for a normal distribution, but subsidies do nothing if not queer a market.

When things get bad enough, you can bail out the subsidized market, because two bad policies form a double negative and make things all keen again, don’t they?

Oh, and speaking of great economists like Sowell, via @GinTheGin, we have an example in Herman Cain where the legal system has been sadly distorted:

The real scandal is that the law allows people to impose heavy costs on others at little or no cost to themselves. That is a perfect setting for legalized extortion.

The good news is that the people smelled rat, or at least John Edwards’ hair spray, and knew there was more to the story. Increasingly, where there is smoke, there is smoke machine.

Update: linked by Daily Pundit.

Category: Economics

Victor Davis Hanson Thinks Than Romney Is The Only GOP Candidate Who Can Win

Posted on | November 10, 2011 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

Roger Simon of PJTV interviews the mighty Victor Davis Hanson. The post was linked by somebody, then dropped. Probably a simple rescheduling, though, I’ll not cite the blogger, on the off chance that the retraction has some other meaning. If you blog enough, these odd corner cases of etiquette will pop up, I suppose.

Fascinating stuff. Hanson’s take on BHO is really quite interesting. He has far more respect for BHO’s political acumen than many, who figure BHO for a pure thug.

As for whether Romney is the only candidate with sufficient chops to stand a chance next year, well, if it is the case that we are needing any savior figure, I call that a loss in advance. If Romney does win the nomination and the election, it shall have been on the support of the Tea Partiers. He had better both know that and behave accordingly.

Category: Barack Obama, PJTV, Politics, Uncategorized

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The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

LIVE AT FIVE – 11.11.11

‘A Million Miles an Hour’: Interview With Herman Cain Campaign Chief of Staff

Crowder: ‘They Hate Capitalism. But They Love Weed‘

Tell Me Something I Don’t Know

It’s Morning in Vanuatu Again

Jerry Sandusky Is To Joe Paterno As. . .

Well-Informed Customers Are Well-Armed Customers

Victor Davis Hanson Thinks Than Romney Is The Only GOP Candidate Who Can Win

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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