The Other McCain

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

From the Future Ambassador to Vanuatu

Posted on | October 14, 2011 | 14 Comments

Feb. 17, 2010: When we first met by accident in an elevator
at CPAC, Marco Rubio said to me, ‘Hey, your camera’s pink.’

After the events of this afternoon, I e-mailed my American Spectator story (about Marco Rubio denying my Thursday exclusive) to a fellow journalist. He replied, “My guess is that you were right about the story, too.” And this seemed to require an explanation on my part:

Well, whether or not I was “right” — that is, whether my source was correct about the actions and motives of Cesar Conda — the facts are that (a) my sources said what my sources said, (b) [redacted description of key source], (c) Cesar was named specifically, (d) this story just “fell in my lap” and (e) both Rubio’s advocacy for an early primary and Conda’s Romney connection had been previously reported elsewhere.
The dots were already forming a pattern. My sources just named Conda as the glue connecting the dots. Maybe they were mistaken, who knows? But I didn’t “make it up out of thin air,” and the fact that my sources don’t want to fall afoul of Conda (or Rubio or Romney) was something I knew before I reported it. Ergo, I’m on the hook for a story I can’t prove but which a lot of people vow is the real explanation behind all this.
Also, glancing at my notes, I now see that the name “Jeb Bush” appears for some reason, reminding me that the phrase “the Jeb Bush people” was used by one of my sources to describe the forces arrayed behind the (alleged, but officially denied) Conda/ Rubio/ Romney push. But I can’t remember now which source used that phrase, and I also don’t remember whether this was characterized as a known fact or just speculation.
Well, just another day on the beat, eh? I was sitting here Thursday minding my own business when the phone rang, and the tip struck me as heavy enough to make some calls and turn it into a story, so I’ll take whatever blowback I get. As I said in an update to my blog just now, I plan to be laughing about this over beers in Tampa in August, and by then maybe it will be sufficiently safe to tell the truth. Cesar Conda will come into the hotel bar, offer to buy me a beer and say, “Hey, Stace, can you get me in with the Cain people? Because ever since the Romney campaign imploded after that Vegas debate last October, I’ve been trying to get through to them, and they won’t talk to me. And now that Paul Ryan is Herman’s VP pick …”
Eh, forgive and forget, y’know? Let bygones be bygones, I always say. It’s the Christian thing to do.
— Robert Stacy McCain
Future U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu

 





 

 
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Category: Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Florida, Herman Cain, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, Vanuatu

‘Troubling Similarities’: Politico Reporter Kendra Marr Fired for Plagiarism

Posted on | October 14, 2011 | 12 Comments

A New York Times reporter raised hell when he saw his work recycled at Politico:

Late in the evening of Wednesday, October 12, the writer of a  piece about transportation policy published in the New York Times e-mailed one of our senior editors about potential problems with a piece on the same subject  that was published in POLITICO. Early Thursday morning, editors here compared  the pieces, and did see some similarities in phrasing. These were troubling  enough to warrant further examination of reporter Kendra Marr’s work.
This examination produced other examples of stories on transportation issues  that bore troubling similarities to work earlier published by others. Some of  these examples involved specific turns of phrase or passages that bore close  resemblance to work published elsewhere. Others involved similarities in the way  stories were organized to present their findings. . . .
Material published in our pages borrowed from the  work of others, without attribution, in ways which we cannot defend and will not  tolerate.

Marr actually was asked to resign, but “fired” fit better in the headline. Betsy Rothstein at Fishbowl DC gives the background:

The news is weighing hard on Politico executives. Marr was a beloved reporter in the newsroom. Even in their Editor’s note they refer to her as a “friend.” She was conscientious, solid. She wasn’t known to be among Politico‘s rock stars, but as a former reporter for WaPo whose work has appeared in The Orange County Register, San Jose Mercury News and The Miami Herald, she had a bright future. Now, we’re told, her career in Washington journalism is effectively over.

She was “beloved.” Thief. She was a “friend.” Thief. She was “conscientious.” Thief. “She had a bright future.” Thief.

Plagiarism is an attempt to take credit for someone else’s work. It is an act of selfishness and sloth, because nothing is easier than the act of basic courtesy involved in giving credit where credit is due. (Thanks to Jeff Quinton for the tip, by the way.)

Somewhere along the way to becoming “a beloved reporter” at Politico, Kendra Marr started getting away with thievery. It is quite likely she committed minor acts of plagiarism while at the Washington Post and didn’t caught, so that dishonesty became a habit, and she continued doing it until she did get caught.

And now her “bright future” is spoken of in the past tense.

Category: Journalism

Herman Cain: The Back Story

Posted on | October 14, 2011 | 68 Comments

Herman Cain at the Value Voters Summit, Oct. 7 (Photo: Robert Stacy McCain)

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia) is one of the most conservative members of the Senate. But being a native of Georgia, I remember Isakson’s reputation as a “squish” — damned near a RINO — among the hard-core conservatives of my acquaintance. It is therefore a rather ironic fact that the first time I heard of Herman Cain was in 2004 when my older brother Kirby, who still lives in Douglas County, Ga., called me while I was working at The Washington Times to tell me about this guy he’d heard on the radio who was, he assured me, “the real deal.” (If you knew Kirby, you’d understand why that got my attention.)

Cain was then a candidate in the 2004 Georgia Republican primary for Senate and, after Kirby called, I urged one of our reporters to investigate this insurgent candidate. Whatever ended up in the paper as a result of my editorial suggestion, what I learned from my own research was that the GOP Establishment had anointed Isakson as their candidate — and by “GOP Establishment” of course I mean Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman.

Back during the Bush years, Rove and Mehlman were the chief puppeteers pulling strings in DC to manipulate Republican primary contests across the country. This sort of top-down intervention was simultaneously (a) notorious among grassroots conservatives and (b) nearly impossible to prove, so that anyone who mentioned it publicly could be dismissed as a paranoid kook. But everybody knew what was really going on, and the most infamous example was in the 2004 Pennsylvania Senate primary where the conservative grassroots spported Pat Toomey, while the Rove/Mehlman axis put the fix in for the RINO incumbent, Arlen Specter.

You can ask Rick Santorum about this: Santorum was more or less forced to walk the plank for Specter’s re-election but — two years later, when Santorum faced a tough re-election contest in a bad year for Republicans — Specter and the GOP Establishment were MIA. What the Rove/Mehlman axis did to Santorum is fairly well-known, but how they conspired to beat Herman Cain in the 2004 Georgia Senate primary is less well-known. It is therefore helpful to read a recap of Cain’s 2004 campaign by Atlantic‘s Molly Ball:

Cain came out of nowhere: a virtual unknown banking on his business background, his message and his ability — honed as a paid motivational speaker — to hold audiences in thrall. And he very nearly forced Isakson, who was supposed to have it in the bag, into a humbling runoff.
“Had he understood politics a little bit more, had he started a little bit earlier and done things a little bit differently, he would be the United States senator from Georgia now,” said Atlanta-based Republican strategist Tom Perdue, who supported Cain in 2004 but didn’t work on his campaign.
Perdue believes the 2004 race was a vital political education for Cain.
The former Godfather’s Pizza CEO went into that race “naive about politics,” thinking he could command the political arena like he did the world of business. He came out of it with a better understanding, Perdue said.
“He learned from his mistakes,” Perdue said. “That doesn’t mean he’s going to be president of the United States. But he learned, and that in itself tells you that he’s a smart man.”

Read the whole thing, and maybe you’ll understand why I grit my teeth whenever some critic of Cain blames him for never having held elective office before. And maybe you’ll also understand why, despite my fanatical support for Herman Cain professional journalistic neutral objectivity, I have a soft spot for Rick Santorum. Both he and Cain are, in a sense, victims of the same kind of shady “party insider” machinations that are now being used to try to orchestrate the nomination of Mitt Romney.

As Michelle Malkin said yesterday: “Damn, I hate politics.” And every time I see Karl Rove on Fox News badmouthing Herman Cain, I tremble in fury, wishing they’d stick a “Mitt Romney Stooge” disclaimer on Rove.


Category: Election 2012, Georgia, Herman Cain, History, Karl Rove, Rick Santorum

Well, Of Course He Denies It: Marco Rubio Says I ‘Made It Up Out of Thin Air’

Posted on | October 14, 2011 | 57 Comments

My exclusive yesterday — sources telling me that Marco Rubio’s pro-Romney chief of staff Cesar Conda worked behind-the-scenes to persuade GOP leaders in Florida to move their primary to January — gets an official denial via Javier Manjarres at The Shark Tank:

“Don’t you think if something like that had happened, you would have heard something? 100% fiction, they just made it up out of thin air . . . Ok, BTW, if this were true, it means you got scooped in you own state!!!! Hahaha”

He’s a joker, that Marco. But as to me scooping Javier, this story just “fell in my lap,” as they say. The various and overlapping alliances that define Florida GOP politics — nearly as Byzantine nowadays as South Carolina — make it difficult to prove stuff like this, especially when the sources could lose their jobs if it were known they were talking to reporters.

So Rubio’s denial is a fact, just as the statements by my sources are facts. I report both and, as Allahpundit said, “R.S. McCain reports, you decide.”

UPDATE: Allahpundit likewise got a denial:

A source close to Rubio e-mailed us to note that Florida’s primary date is chosen by committee. He emphatically denies that either Cesar Conda or Rubio himself influenced the process.

Just got off the phone with various sources and will add some helpful background in a few minutes. But as I said to one source, “This is why I didn’t bother to give Rubio’s office a call yesterday — of course they’ll deny it. I knew that, and I wasn’t alleging anything criminal. There’s no law against people in politics exercising influence, and the question of motive is always a matter of speculation in stuff like this.”

UPDATE II: When a politician publicly accuses me of making up a story “out of thin air,” additional reporting is required. And inevitably, my need to protect sources makes it difficult to explain how sources know what they know, because to invoke the credibility of the source — well, a good reporter never burns his sources, you see.

Let’s be clear about two things:

  1. Marco Rubio has been an outspoken advocate of an early date for the Florida primary since at least 2007. Floridians have complained for years that they have become an afterthought in the primary schedule. Florida’s influence was once decisive, as in 1972 when George Wallace’s stomping of Ed Muskie in the Democratic primary pretty much put an end to Muskie’s front-runner status.
  2. Nearly everybody in the Florida GOP agrees with Rubio. As I said in my American Spectator column this morning, “The early-primary madness gripping Florida Republicans has been well-nigh universal for months.”

One of my Florida sources first became suspicious about the early-primary madness after seeing a Politico article about it in February. The ostensible motive for the move to the Jan. 31 date — the exoteric rationale, as it were — has always been about “making Florida count.” But once you examine that pretext in the cold light of logic, it’s doesn’t make sense. Florida would have counted as much or more if they’d held their primary in March as they will byh having it in January, and they’ll be penalized half their delegates to the national convention for violating RNC rules.

If the exoteric rational does not pass the smell test, deductive logic suggests the existence of an esoteric motive — a hidden agenda, as it were — known only to insiders. As one source put it, the basic idea of having an early Florida primary involved the notion that, by forcing an early decision in the GOP presidential campaign, there would be more time to unite the party behind the eventual nominee, and thus have a big group hug at the Tampa convention in August. All the bruises would be healed, money would be pouring in, and then, Onward to Victory in November!

Maybe you buy into that argument — which has been made often by Cesar Conda, my sources tell me — and you can believe that without regard to any suspicion of a sinister conspiracy to anoint Mitt Romney. But Conda’s known support for Romney permits such a suspicion, and then there is the “Question the Timing” issue.

If the special committee that decide Florida would violate RNC rules was determined to do so — and this intent was being reported as early as eight months ago — why was the decision delayed until after the state GOP straw poll Sept. 24 in Orlando? And why would a very credible source have named Cesar Conda specifically as a behind-the-scenes advocate of that move?

As I say, this wasn’t a story I had to dig up. It just fell in my lap. I accept the official denial, but I don’t blame my sources for being suspicious.

Do you?

UPDATE III: The February story in Politico:

Rubio backs early Florida primary

By Alexander Burns
Defenders of Florida’s early primary date have a new ally with some serious clout: Marco Rubio.
The freshman GOP senator told The Palm Beach Post that Florida shouldn’t move its primary from January to later in the presidential election season, despite entreaties from national Republicans to abide by the RNC-mandated schedule.
“If the Republican Party wants to pay for the elections in Florida, they can have them any day they want,” Rubio said. “But as long as the voters of Florida are going to pay for this election, it should be on the most meaningful day possible. An election in late January costs the same as an election in April, but it’s a lot more meaningful.”
Rubio, who’s viewed as a potential candidate for national office down the line, was careful to say that Florida didn’t intend to leapfrog traditional early states like Iowa and New Hampshire — even though Florida’s primary date as currently scheduled would do exactly that.
“Those are established states and I don’t think Florida desires to get ahead of any of them,” Rubio said. . . .

Read the whole thing. But why did Rubio present the choice as being between January and April, when the actual RNC-approved guidelines would have permitted Florida to hold its primary March 6?

UPDATE IV: Reporting Rubio’s denial at The American Spectator:

One of the problems with quoting anonymous sources is that they’re anonymous for a reason. If your story is challenged, and your source could get fired if their identity were known, the requirements of confidentially prevent you from saying, “Well, here’s who says it’s true,” with the source’s reputation as evidence of credibility. So I’m on the hook, and Rubio’s denial is a matter of record, and I’m sure we’ll all be laughing and having beers together at the Republican convention in Florida in August.

As I said to Javier Manjarres on Twitter:

Which means (a) it’s more essential than ever that we rally the conservative movement behind Herman Cain, and (b) I’ll need enough travel money to keep me on the campaign trail all the way to the convention in Tampa, so I can collect my free beer from Marco.

 

Category: Election 2012, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney

Zonation Suggests Herman Cain ‘Smoke Crack’ To Impress Cornell West

Posted on | October 14, 2011 | 14 Comments

by Smitty

This is just a great essay from a great American. Watch the whole thing.

God bless you, Alfonzo Rachel.

Update: fixed an incredibly annoying name typo. Sorry, ‘Zo! Also, linked at The Lonely Conservative and Nice Deb.

Category: Video

You Don’t Do Champagne Work On A Kool-Aid Budget

Posted on | October 14, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

I completely understand Ladd Ehlinger’s point here. When you’re trying to accomplish something artistic, tools do matter. As ancient commenter Solomon noted:

If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct. Eccl10:10

And why waste wisdom overcoming tool deficiencies, unless that itself is part of the art? All this is to say: Ladd has a point.

So, the bazillion dollar question is: how does one go from dead 0 to auteur? Jerry Pournelle has noted that, as a writer, you throw away your first million words. What is the corresponding duration of film, one wonders? Then again, some say you never ‘arrive’, to note Buddy Rich:

Late in his life, Buddy Rich was asked if he considered himself the world’s greatest drummer, and he gave an inspiring reply: “Let’s put it this way: I have that ambition. You don’t really attain greatness. You attain a certain amount of goodness, and if you’re really serious about your goodness, you’ll keep trying to be great. I have never reached a point in my career where I was totally satisfied with anything I’ve ever done, but I keep trying.”

One of the ironies of education, I’ve found, is that the best learning comes while teaching. That is, the effort required to translate some knowledge from my head to that of another has a massive clarifying effect.

But we often start with that Kool-Aid budget. And I submit that quite a few problems are heuristic in nature: you’ve just got to drink some Kool-Aid prototypes just to understand the problem enough to undertake the champagne work. At the risk of sounding a teeny bit Freudean, I was raised by such a perfectionist mother that she would regularly avoid trying things, knowing that the result would be sub-champagne. A major part of growing up was forgiving her that.

Maybe if you’re Mozart, you can toss off a Symphony #40 as Zeus toss out Athena from his brow:
For the rest of us, the process of elimination will have to do. And if a Kool-Aid budget is what you got, well, you go to art with the budget you have, not the budget you wish you had, to mangle Rumsfeld.

Update: linked by That Mr. G Guy.

Category: Art, Ladd Ehlinger, Video

Will N.H. Flinch in Primary Standoff?

Posted on | October 14, 2011 | 5 Comments

A glimmer of hope to avoid a December date for the New Hampshire primary:

New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner is imperiling the state’s place in the political world by threatening to hold a December primary, New Hampshire GOP Chairman Wayne MacDonald charged Thursday. . . .
MacDonald urged Gardner to hold the state’s election Jan. 10. . . .
Gardner, who has full control over the state’s primary date, released a statement Wednesday saying he was willing to drastically reshuffle the primary calendar to keep New Hampshire at least seven days ahead of the next nominating contest. He said the only way he’d consider Jan. 10 is if Nevada moves its caucus — currently scheduled for Jan. 14 — back three days. On Wednesday night, the Nevada GOP declined to make the move.
Reiterating his confidence in Gardner, MacDonald repeated his call, first reported by the New Hampshire Union Leader, to take a more lax interpretation of the state law that requires a seven day buffer before the next “similar election.”
“There is a difference between a primary and a caucus, so I don’t think Nevada should affect us,” MacDonald said. “The 10th, to me, seems to be the most sensible date.”

That might be just enough of a loophole to allow New Hampshire to save face. Let’s pray Secretary of State Gardner will listen to reason.

If he does do the primary on Jan. 10, who gets screwed? Nevada. Because I think most reporters will be like me: It doesn’t make sense to leave Manchester, N.H., on the morning of the 11th to fly to Nevada to cover their caucus on the 14th, and then get on a plane the 15th to fly to South Carolina (their primary is the 21st). Better to go directly from New Hampshire to South Carolina and let Nevada fend for itself.

So a Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary would probably deprive the Jan. 14 Nevada caucuses of a good bit of press coverage, and might just give me an excuse to come home for a few days after New Hampshire before hitting the road for South Carolina.

Category: Election 2012, Nevada, New Hampshire

Karl Rove Says Herman Cain Campaign ‘Not Gonna Have a Nice Ending’

Posted on | October 14, 2011 | 57 Comments

Via POH Diaries and Gateway Pundit:

Let me be blunt in saying that I am thoroughly familiar with every argument against Herman Cain’s candidacy, and far more aware than most political journalists of the organizational challenges (to put it mildly) of the Cain campaign. Last night I was on the phone with my buddy Ali Akbar as we bemoaned bewailed bitched about discussed the hopeless clusterfuck organizational challenges of Cain’s staff situation. While all campaigns go through their rough spots, and I’ve seen campaigns win elections despite serious errors, Herman Cain’s campaign now faces two huge problems:

  1. They’re less than 90 days away from the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. Even if the Nevada situation can be worked out to keep New Hampshire from jumping to December, 90 days from Iowa is still a damned short time to put together an effective ground game in all 99 counties in Iowa.
  2. They’re up against Team Romney. Say what you will about Mitt, his campaign staff is a ruthlessly disciplined machine, and they’ve got about a 5-to-1 fund-raising advantage over Cain.

As I explained to Ali, if the Cain campaign were to raise $100,000 every day, that would be $3 million a month or about $8 million between now and Jan. 3. The problem is that the Perry campaign’s sitting on something like $15 million and Romney raised $10 million in the last quarter. Even if the Perry campaign didn’t raise another dime, they could spend $5 million a month between now Jan. 3, and that’s a heckuva lot of TV ads in Iowa and New Hampshire. Whatever Romney’s cash-on-hand figures, he’s got the big bundlers like Georgette Mosbacher behind him, and will have no shortage of cash for TV ads.

How can the Cain campaign possibly hope to compete with that? If you just look at it as a problem of simple math, by the ordinary logic of campaign operations, Cain would be doomed beyond hope even if his staff were as efficient as Team Romney. So I cannot necessarily say that Rove’s basic calculation is wrong. Insofar as normal politics is concerned, Rove’s prediction of an unhappy ending for the Cain campaign seems smart.

But normal politics has taken a savage beating the past few years, and it’s hard to calculate the odds of success for the kind of “outside-the-box” campaign that Cain and his staff have been talking about since December. Nobody expected, 10 months ago, that Herman Cain would be where he is now, neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney at the front of the field. Hell, nobody expected this even one month ago, when Cain’s poll numbers were stuck in single digits. It’s been only 20 days since Cain shocked the world with his victory in the Sept. 24 Florida straw poll, so everybody’s still trying to get their heads wrapped around the concept of “Herman Cain, Republican contender.”

If you’ve got a Road to the White House map, we’re currently off at the edge in uncharted seas where the legend reads, “Here Be Dragons.”

And when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

It just occurred to me that today, Oct. 14, is the two-year anniversary of the day in 2009 when Lisa De Pasquale invited me to join a conference call with a guy named Doug Hoffman. Maybe you’ve heard of him.

Miracles can happen, and what happened in NY-23 two years ago was a rare kind of inspirational moment in politics. And when it was over, a new kind of campaign paradigm had been created:

Yates Walker ate breakfast in the Blue Moon Café on Main Street in Saranac Lake, New York, on the morning of November 4, [2009] and delivered an after-action report on the battle that had just been fought in the upstate 23rd District.
“We took a CPA from 9 percent to 46 percent in two and a half weeks,” said Walker, a young veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division who had been hired 18 days earlier to work on Doug Hoffman’s congressional campaign staff. “I couldn’t be prouder.”
He fell 5,000 votes short of defeating Democrat Bill Owens, but Hoffman’s surprising surge in the closing weeks of the three-way special election in upstate New York had, in Walker’s words, turned the bespectacled accountant into “an electric symbol of conservatism.” . . .

Read the whole thing in case you’ve forgotten that magical two and a half weeks. Karl Rove never saw that coming, either, and if Herman Cain is going to beat Mitt Romney, his campaign is going to have make that kind of lightning strike twice. Such were the thoughts that came to my mind in the wee hours this morning, after I had filed my latest American Spectator column:

Hickory trees were blazing brilliant gold in the forest surrounding my home on the western slope of South Mountain as I stepped outside Thursday afternoon to take a call on my cellphone from a well-informed source. My enjoyment of the autumn scenery was diminished only slightly by the cool drizzly overcast weather, but much more by the shadows of gloom gathering over the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, which was the reason for the phone call.
After listening with great interest, I walked inside to the dining room table, picked up a pen and asked my source to repeat the information which I scrawled into a notebook: “Rubio [chief] of staff — CESAR — used to be w/ Romney’s campaign … used his contacts to push primary to 31st because they want Romney in.” A couple more phone calls to D.C. and Florida, a few minutes of online research, and I had an exclusive: “Top Rubio Staffer Reportedly Pushed for Early Florida Primary to Help Romney.” Perhaps not the kind of story Matt Drudge would consider worthy of a banner headline, but a key piece of the puzzle surrounding events that have hopelessly scrambled the 2012 schedule. . . .

Please read the whole thing. We’re on the road to political Armageddon, folks, and the next stop on this road is Las Vegas. Hit the freaking tip jar!

Category: Doug Hoffman, Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Herman Cain, Karl Rove, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney
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