Author: David Weigel

When I returned from Atlanta to D.C. in November 2009, having wrapped up coverage of the Libertarian Party’s presidential campaign for Reason magazine, Spencer Ackerman came to me with an idea: Why not work for The Washington Independent? Reason and I were parting ways, and no one else in the city had a beat quite like mine — covering the conservative movement from every angle, breaking bread with its leaders and activists. TWI Editor-in-Chief Laura McGann seconded the idea and recommended me to David Bennahum and Blake de Pastino. A few interviews later, I settled into my desk, set up my phone, and started working.

Now, 15 months later, I’m only just realizing how lucky I was. I got to work with a first-rate team of reporters like Mike Lillis, Daphne Eviatar, Rachel Hartman, and Mary Kane — our new editor, replacing Laura after she went to dominate the future-of-media beat at Nieman Lab. I was given absolute freedom to cover the conservative movement at its most exciting moment in at least a generation. I got to travel to Kentucky, Missouri, New York and Massachusetts, to watch this moment unfold. And I got to represent my work and our site on NPR and MSNBC, adding — I hope — some context and some wisdom to a topic that is too often mocked and derided.

This is my last day at TWI. On Tuesday, I’ll be picking up this story where it left off for my new blog at The Washington Post. I’m grateful beyond words for everyone here who made me a better reporter, everyone out there who read my stuff, and — not least — the sources who trusted me as I developed this beat.

Keep reading TWI. I’m proud of what we’ve put together here. And come Tuesday, I’ll be another avid reader of this site. One thing we had in common, as reporters and editors, was that we were less interested in the trappings and rewards of D.C. and more interested in asking ourselves what our journalism was supposed to do. I’m eager to see what TWI’s team, with that attitude, comes up with next.

Lindsay Beyerstein, operating on the principle that an expense-approval system slapdash enough to miss an expense for Voyeur West Hollywood, finds extremely strange expense reports filed by RNC staffers under the heading of “meals” and “office supplies. I asked for a comment from the RNC early in the day — haven’t heard back on it.

Rudy Giuliani’s endorsement of Marco Rubio is one of the most obvious — and delightful — cases of political revenge in a long while. In July 2007, Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.) promised his endorsement to Giuliani. At the time, the former mayor of New York City was way ahead in the Florida presidential primary polls. As Mark Halperin and John Heilemann tell it in “Game Change”:

When Crist arrived, Giuliani made his appeal–and was thrilled with the reply.

“I’d like to support you,” Crist said.

… Giuliani’s team so valued their new prize that they proceeded to build their entire fall strategy around it.

Then, in October, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had a one-on-one meeting with Crist, convincing him that Giuliani couldn’t win.

A few weeks later, in early November, the Giuliani people got the word from Florida that Crist’s endorsement was being suspended until further notice. Giuliani tried to reach Crist, but he was out of the country, on a Latin American trade mission — having taken Giuliani’s nomination strategy with him.

Now, Crist is sagging in the polls in his Senate run. Giuliani gets to stick the knife in him.

The defeated candidate in NY-23, who helped swing a safe Republican seat over to Rep. Bill Owens (D-N.Y.), is adding to the underserved genre of “books by interesting candidates who lost” — see “The Unmaking of a Mayor” by William F. Buckley and “Primary Mistake” by Steve Laffey.

Scozzafava told WRVO public radio she’s begun assembling notes.

“I have been kind of putting pieces together, yes, just, I think, more so for me, just to kind of go back and recall different moments, and I had jotted down certain occasions and I’ve got a whole calendar of events, and I’m kind of thinking about it again,” said Scozzafava.

The news is being sent around by still-angry supporters of Doug Hoffman, the Conservative candidate taking another crack at the race this year.

Add Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.) to the roster of Republicans hedging a bit on whether the party can repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Petri said Republicans don’t have to repeal the health care plan. They could effectively quash it by refusing to fund the initiatives as each one comes before Congress for authorization.

“The president can’t spend money unless it’s appropriated by the Congress,” he said.

As Donny Shaw pointed out when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) argued for this strategy, “refusing to fund” is harder than it sounds — the president can veto appropriations bills just as easily as he can veto a “repeal” bill. And teeing up entitlement cuts for a Democratic president to veto — well, that’s a fight Democrats would enjoy.

Amy Gardner’s profile of Stephen Fincher, a first-time congressional candidate in Tennessee who’s easily won conservative support with an irresistible bio (say it quick — “a gospel-singing farmer from Frog Jump, Tennessee”), reveals that he got almost $2.5 million in farm subsidies from 1995 and 2006. Fincher explains:

He… said the subsidies come with conditions, such as when he was required to spend thousands of dollars building an earthen terrace to control erosion. And without the money, he said, American farmers couldn’t compete with countries that subsidize fuel and fertilizer more generously than the United States.

“People are quick to say with their mouth full, ‘Well, the American farmer is on the dole,’ ” Fincher said. “But a loaf of bread is two bucks when it could be 10 bucks. I know what it is with the government in my business. We would be all for not having government in our business, but we need a fair system.”

The sort of argument a liberal might make, if we’re being honest.

Stories like these, whenever they surface, are bad news for mainstream conservatives trying to use this energy in a less insane manner.

A group that calls itself the Guardians of the free Republics wants to “restore America” by peacefully dismantling parts of the government, according to its Web site.

As of Wednesday, more than 30 governors had received letters saying if they don’t leave office within three days they will be removed, according to an internal intelligence note by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The note was obtained by The Associated Press.

According to the Guardians’ website, they want to achieve their goals “BEHIND THE SCENES, lawfully, peacefully, without violence and without risking civil war.” But state governments aren’t chancing it.

Kevin DeAnna writes about the new Temple University course on Mayor Lou Barletta’s tenure in Hazelton — a class called, evocatively, “War in Hazelton.”

Week two begins with chronicles of “nativist violence” that characterizes much of American history, as well as the inevitable contention that arguments for restricting immigration were solely a product of racist ideology… Weeks Four and Five helpfully inform us that  “the United States has interfered in Latin American politics in ways that perpetuate oppression and encourage violence.” You’ve got the reconquista coming, gringo.

The review is at the website of Young People for Western Civilization — hence the pro-Barletta tone.

The “suggested amount” portion of the donation form is crossed out. There isn’t a box to check for no donation, so the would-be donor has simply drawn and filled in a new bubble and scrawled “NO.”

“What the hell happened in NY District 23?” writes the anonymous donor to an unrewarded Republican National Committee. “You guys supporting Dede Scozzafava?”

The form is one of many collected by blogger, columnist and TV pundit Michelle Malkin since the RNC chipped in for the doomed congressional campaign of Scozzafava, a moderate Republican who eventually withdrew from a November 2009 special election and helped Rep. Bill Owens (D-N.Y.) squeak past Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. In the wake of Monday’s Daily Caller story on the RNC’s lavish spending, including a $1,923 check to the Voyeur West Hollywood nightclub — an embarrassment to RNC Chairman Michael Steele for which the offender, Allison Meyers, was fired, and her upcoming events postponed — Malkin put up another batch of defiled RNC donation forms, with graffiti like “Fire Steele. Hire Cheney. (Dick or Liz.) Then Get Back to Me.”

The Voyeur story dogged the RNC all week, especially after the committee pointed to outsized Democratic National Committee expenses as a distraction (giving the DNC an opportunity to take another whack at the juicier RNC tale) and after Politico noticed that a typo on one solicitation form sent donors to a phone sex line. But for many conservative activists, it only accelerated and amplified a revolt against the RNC that had been brewing for months. It’s given the growing number of conservative PACs and projects a new selling point to potential donors. And it’s emboldened the sizable number of loose-lipped Republican activists who are working to create new institutions outside of Steele’s purview.

“This nightclub story is absolutely awful,” said Eric Odom, a Tea Party activist and the chairman of Liberty First PAC, “but the RNC just came off of a meeting in Hawaii, and that was even worse. I don’t think there are conservatives who are going to turn on the RNC just because of this story. I think it’s the nail in the coffin.”

According to Odom — who famously denied Steele a speaking slot at the April 15, 2009 anti-tax Tea Party in Chicago (Steele, at the time, denied that he had wanted to speak) — donors to Liberty First PAC have been submitting RNC-bashing notes along with their checks. One out of ten donations via Paypal, said Odom, came with a message along the lines of “2009 was the last year I’ll donate to a party.”

Mark Skoda, the leader of the Memphis TEA Party who launched the Ensuring Liberty PAC at February’s National Tea Party Convention, told TWI that the troubles that had beset the RNC would be impossible in his group — and potential donors knew it.

“We’re not going to be buying first-class tickets,” said Skoda, who is convening the first meeting of Ensuring Liberty’s board next week. “There’ll be no big parties. We’re operating like a business. I used to work for FedEx — these things like vast overcharges didn’t happen.”

Skoda, who said he “felt bad” for Steele after hearing the Voyeur news, emphasized that Ensuring Liberty would be “a complement,” not a competitor, to the RNC. It would back Republican candidates, albeit after making sure they fit the PAC’s exacting standards and didn’t just have an “R” next to their names on the ballot. But other conservatives are less diplomatic. On Wednesday night, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins sent a blunt message to supporters: “Don’t give money to the RNC.” On Thursday afternoon, the Leadership Institute — whose president, Morton Blackwell, is an RNC committeeman – posted a Facebook message commenting favorably on the Perkins news. (Blackwell is out of the country and did not respond to requests for comment.)

The evidence of conservative donors taking their money elsewhere is hard to track. In the final quarter of 2009, for example, the most prominent competitors for conservatives’ donations pulled in modest amounts of money. Our Country Deserves Better PAC, the group behind the Tea Party Express, had only $161,174 in receipts. The Senate Conservatives Fund, Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) PAC to aid his hand-picked candidates, raised $238,189. By comparison, the RNC raised $22,295,310. But activists point to the RNC’s low cash-on-hand numbers to make their case.

“The bottom line is that Michael Steele never should have gotten this job in the first place,” said one exasperated conservative fundraiser. “Nothing that’s happening now should surprise anyone.”

That criticism has surfaced again and again as conservatives court donors for their projects. On Thursday, Jonathan Strong — the reporter whose initial Voyeur story started the latest stampede against the RNC – cobbled together the last few years’ worth of negative stories about Steele’s managerial and financial problems. They hadn’t been enough to push conservatives away from Steele when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006 or the RNC chairmanship in 2009. Indeed, in 2005, conservatives rallied around Steele when the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee hacked into the Senate candidate’s credit report to get the details on his personal bankruptcies.

Conservatives are no longer giving Steele a pass on those stories. The less faith small- and big-dollar donors have in the RNC, the more valuable they can be to other PACs, which are not being shy about soliciting their support.

“When I fly, I fly coach,” said David Bossie, the chairman of Citizens United and its political PAC, another competitor for small-dollar conservative donors. “We’re not lavish. If you donate to us, you know your money is going right back into the field to support conservative candidates, seeking out people who wouldn’t otherwise get support.”

The Susan B. Anthony List, the American Conservative Union’s PAC and Our Country Deserves Better can all point donors to their low-overheard campaigns in NY-23 or the Massachusetts special election for the U.S. Senate, contrasting those with the performance of the RNC.

The party committee is well aware of its predicament. “The press shop’s about as busy now as it was during the days that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) suspended his presidential campaign,” groused one conservative strategist who’s worked with the RNC.

The problem for conservatives is that dividing their efforts, and nurturing mistrust in the RNC, might damage the GOP’s 2010 strategy even if competing groups are well funded.

“You’re seeing a lot of small donors, who in other times would be discovering the party committee, going to these PACs instead,” said Anthony Corrallo, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies campaign finance. “Large amounts of potential money that the RNC may have been able to attract are now going elsewhere. And you’d rather see money located in the parties — the RNC can do much more coordinated GOTV [get out the vote] and advertising.”

RNC defenders could point the detractors to the left’s experience with divided effort. In 2003, a team of big liberal donors that included George Soros and Peter Lewis founded America Coming Together, spending more than $10 million for GOTV. Because ACT couldn’t coordinate with the Democratic Party or John Kerry’s presidential bid, some of its efforts were wasted. And in 2007, the disbanded group paid a $750,000 fine to the FEC for fundraising violations.

It remains to be seen whether conservatives can avoid a similar fate.

The polling firm releases a lengthy look at the movement; read it after the jump.

Here’s a video making the rounds on the right — a compilation of outrageous scenes from 2002 and 2003 anti-war protests. The editor: Evan Coyne Maloney, a documentary filmmaker who cut his teeth on these videos and went on to make the education expose “Indoctrinate U.”

Conservatives haven’t given any ground on this since the end of the health care debate, and that strategy seems to have worked — interest in the “Tea Parties gone wild” narrative has petered out. But as someone who watched these Maloney videos way back when, seven and eight years ago, I both understand why conservatives think they’re being covered unfairly now and why liberals think that they, at the time, were covered unfairly.

“Anti-war protest invites kooks” in 2002 was really a dog-bites-man story — the wild-eyed types who showed up at big events in New York and San Francisco had been acting out like that for, well, decades, to the great irritation of the moderate liberals who were getting out into the streets and swelling the attendance of these rallies. But the Tea Party movement is really something new under the sun. The number of conservatives (if you don’t count social conservative extremists like Randall Terry) who’d show up to protests waving signs was, in the modern media age, negligible. Because they’re so new, they get (now, if not initially) largely explanatory “what makes them angry” coverage from the press — the left, seven and eight years ago, was getting pro forma “liberals on the march” coverage.

Another angle here is that the wave of threats against Democrats last week is hard to compare to anything that beset Republicans (and Democrats) who backed the Iraq War — although it’s really not fair to tie those threats to Tea Party activists.

This stuff is happening almost to quickly to keep track. The latest (minor) RNC headaches:

– A mis-typed number on a fundraising letter leads to a phone sex service (they still exist?) instead of the RNC’s HQ.

– A media firm, run by the daughter of RNC co-chairman Jan Latimer, is paid for speechwriting work.

And the latest blowback:

– Sarah Palin ostentatiously asks for her name to be removed from the list of “invited” pols at an RNC fundraiser.

I missed this post by Lew Rockwell, the chairman of the Mises Institute and one of the most quietly influential libertarian writers in America, when it ran last week. But the pushback against the “Tea Party anger” narrative hasn’t stopped, so it remains relevant.

[R]ecent Tea Party people who allegedly denounced a Parkinson’s patient or spat at gay and black congressmen might well have been agents. Offensive signs might be Made in DC too. Next might come calls for violence by alleged Tea Party types, and perhaps acts, which can be used to suppress dissent. Peaceful resistance is not only right, it is all that works, unless you are with the state. If anyone urges the use of violence, the state’s characteristic action, he is probably an agent.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this theory spread.

At least that’s how I read the joke in this (pretty darn funny) NRSC video — the one about how “global warming has been solved” under President Obama’s introduction of “low-emission unicorns powered by the renewable energy of rainbows.”

Of course, another way of reading that might be that liberals’ schemes to slow down climate change — the ones that don’t involve drilling, baby, drilling — are inherently comical.

The conservative congressman from North Carolina, a constant critic of the census — one of the people who sounded the alarm about “politicization” when the White House mulled over the idea of letting Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have a say over it — takes to RedState to battle census conspiracy theorists.

No one has advocated a direct boycott of the census but there have been calls to only partially fill out census forms – even though that would be a direct violation of federal law. Those calls are the problem. They feed a climate of mistrust in the census and need to be refuted. Unless conservatives understand how important it is to participate in the census, that climate will result in fewer conservatives being counted and hand Nancy Pelosi more congressional seats.

I and other conservatives have worked hard to fight off the Obama Administration’s harmful census plans. We fought off their attempt to run the census directly. We fought off ACORN’s attempt to participate and we fought off ill-conceived statistical sampling schemes that would artificially inflate the number of Democrat voters. We have been largely successful in keeping this count apolitical and it would be a tragedy if some of our ill-informed friends handed Democrats a victory at the last minute.

Some commentators have mocked reports of low census participation in conservative areas, but op-eds like this reveal that it is, potentially, a problem.

Fourteen months after being tossed aside for Michael Steele, former RNC Chairman Mike Duncan is at the helm of American Crossroads, a group aiming to raise $52 million “from corporations and wealthy conservatives” to win the 2010 elections.

The new American Crossroads organization will be run by former RNC Chairman Mike Duncan and Joanne Davidson, a onetime RNC co-chair. Former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie and former White House adviser Karl Rove are informally advising the organization.

Not entirely different from what happened in 2005 and 2006, when critics of Howard Dean within the Democratic Party formed their own efforts.

Yes, this is still happening. Take it away, Lt. Col. Terry Lakin:

For the first time in all my years of service to our great nation, and at great peril to my career and future, I am choosing to disobey what I believe are illegal orders, including an order to deploy to Afghanistan for my second tour of duty there. I will disobey my orders to deploy because I – and I believe all servicemen and women and the American people – deserve the truth about President Obama’s constitutional eligibility to the office of the presidency and the commander in chief.

And here’s the video, already up to 10,000 views.

Jonathan Martin has the first look at an email going out to Family Research Council supporters in which Tony Perkins tells conservatives to close their wallets to the RNC.

I’ve hinted at this before, but now I am saying it-don’t give money to the RNC. If you want to put money into the political process, and I encourage you to do so, give directly to candidates who you know reflect your values.

As the “hinted” language suggests, this is a sort of last-straw excuse for the FRC to announce something that had been building for a long time — building with extra force since the NY-23 debacle.

It’s true. The liberal radio host (formerly of “Hannity and”) posts a Jan. 7 radio interview with Dale Robertson in which the Tea Party activist defended his use of the slogan “taxpayer = niggar” on a sign. (The interview was conducted three days after I posted a photo of the sign.)

COLMES: What do you mean by the word “NIGGAR?” What is that?

ROBERTSON: I don’t know, what does it mean to you?

COLMES: That’s what?

ROBERTSON: What does it mean to you?

COLMES: I don’t know, I didn’t write it. I’ve never seen that word before. What’s NIGGAR?

ROBERTSON: Well, I just don’t agree with what Congress is doing to the American people.

COLMES: But why that word?

ROBERTSON: Really the proper word is “slave.”

COLMES: You said “Congress is the slaveowner, taxpayer is the NIGGAR.”

ROBERTSON: Well, Ron Dellums actually coined that word.

It looks increasingly like Robertson wasted Tommy Christopher’s time by claiming, out of the blue, that the photo was forged.

Great catch by North Carolina’s Progressive Pulse, which find Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), conscious of possible “party of no” attacks, waffling on whether a Republican Senate would totally repeal and replace the health care bill.

“It may not be total repeal at the end of the day,” said Burr in a radio interview. “It may be a series of fixes over the course of this bill getting enacted that allow us to change and possibly bend that cost curve down.”

Watch:

Burr is not one of the six senatorial signatories of the Club for Growth’s “Repeal It” pledge.