Author: David Weigel

James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart (YouTube, ZUMApress.com)

On Wednesday morning, Salon.com published “James O’Keefe’s Race Problem,” an article by author Max Blumenthal that dug into the past of the 25-year-old activist whose hidden camera sting of ACORN offices devastated the community organizing group. Blumenthal described O’Keefe’s career as “a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment” and honed in an August 30, 2006 “race and conservatism” forum in Arlington, Va. The guests were African-American conservative activist Kevin Martin, National Review writer John Derbyshire, and white nationalist magazine editor Jared Taylor. According to Blumenthal, O’Keefe had helped “plan” the event with a fellow employee of the conservative Leadership Institute. The main piece of evidence: a cropped headshot of O’Keefe from the event and an account from the photographer, an investigator from the anti-racism group the One People’s Project.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The article trafficked around the web at a moderate pace. Because I attended the event, I wrote about it, and the Blumenthal story, here. Soon, other websites grabbed onto the story and added unsupportable spin. Little Green Footballs, whose editor Charles Johnson has made a splashy departure from the right, linked to the revelation about what he called a “white nationalist conference.” Alex Pareene of Gawker wrote that “James O’Keefe pals around with white supremacists,” a winking reference to an attack Sarah Palin made on Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign. Steven Thrasher of the Village Voice wrote that O’Keefe “organized a speaking forum for white supremacists.” Like Blumenthal, they linked the story to Andrew Breitbart, the conservative journalism mogul who ran O’Keefe’s ACORN tapes at his Big Government web site and who subsequently paid the activist for his “life rights” — and who had just finished getting MSNBC and other media outlets to back off on accusing O’Keefe of “wiretapping” the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), while lawyers and O’Keefe claimed he had only attempted to see if the phones were being tampered with.

Seven hours after the Salon story went up, Breitbart went to war. On his Twitter account, he wrote that “Salon, Max Blumenthal, Gawker, Village Voice (usual smear artists) [were] lying through teeth over James O’Keefe.” Larry O’Connor, a colleague from Big Government, called the One People’s Project and demanded more proof that O’Keefe had done what it and Blumenthal had claimed — that he hadn’t merely shown up, but that he’d organized the event and manned a table of racist literature. They called me for details, explaining that O’Keefe had acknowledged he was at the debate but insisted he was not involved with the planning. Afterward, Breitbart went back to Twitter to announce — correctly — that I’d confirmed that the “manning the table” charge was a “LIE.” Another week of Breitbart defending his reporter — and getting news organizations to retract parts of their stories — had commenced, with Blumenthal as the chief target. One Breitbart ally told TWI that his team was “suiting up for full war on this intellectually dishonest punk.”

By every indication, Breitbart’s full court press against the story — and the quick work he did debunking a key detail — has helped keep it out of the headlines. That pushback, coming in the wake of the Landrieu story, is a role reversal for Breitbart’s media network. The 40-year old mogul has won accolades from across the conservative movement for the aggressive reporting and media criticism engineered by his Big sites: Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism. The impact of the ACORN tapes — which O’Keefe recorded on his own, before delivering the story to Big Government — was such that The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets were forced to explain why they hadn’t done similar investigations. On Friday night, Breitbart will introduce a film at the National Tea Party Convention.

Since that explosive 2009 ACORN story, Breitbart’s web sites have often kept unions and Obama administration officials on their heels. Big Government ran multiple stories about the activist past of Kevin Jennings, the founder of the gay, lesbian and transgender rights group GLSEN who joined Barack Obama’s administration as the “safe schools czar.” Big Government uncovered old brochures from Jenning’s group and linked the man himself to sex scandals. Sites like Media Matters — part of what Breitbart calls the “Democrat Media Complex” — invested time and resources into disproving facts in those stories and taking the air out of them. When O’Keefe became the focus of new media attention for the Landrieu debacle and the “race and conservatism” story, Breitbart was put into the same position, relentlessly demanding that media outlets retract unsupported allegations, and turning the narrative from what his employee was accused of to how the media had slanted and bungled the story.

“This is a monumentally hurtful, libelous, hurtful hit piece,” Breitbart told TWI. “There is no basis for any journalism here.”

Breitbart’s efforts to defuse the Salon story were met with some success. Interviewed by TWI, two of the key players in the story said that the most damaging parts of the original piece — that O’Keefe had organized the event, and that he’d helped peddle racist tracts — were unsupportable. Marcus Epstein, the controversial conservative activist who ran the Robert Taft Club — the conservative group that planned the event — told TWI that O’Keefe “did not collaborate” in putting it together.

Isis, the photographer who attended the event for the One People’s Project — she uses a pseudonym, she said, to protect herself from blowback from extremist groups — told TWI that her original characterization of O’Keefe’s involvement, cited by Salon, was not true.

“I don’t believe O’Keefe planned the event,” said Isis. “What I believe is that O’Keefe was there as a compatriot of Epstein’s and was sort of helping out with the event, sort of like when you go to a friend’s party and you decide to help them out.”

Epstein and Isis disagreed about whether O’Keefe had manned a table of racist literature — Epstein said he didn’t, while Isis said he did. She provided Blumenthal with a photo of the table, with copies of American Renaissance magazine (headlines included “The Genetics of Race” and “Black Racist Consciousness, Part I”) splayed across it. On Thursday, Blumenthal stuck by the story.

“O’Keefe admitted that he was there,” Blumenthal told TWI. “He has had a career marked by racial obsession, and this highlights that dimension of his career. Breitbart, who pays O’Keefe, has been exposed. Is anyone surprised that he’d freak out and muddy the water without facts?”

When the Landrieu story broke, Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) — who’s sponsored a congressional resolution honoring O’Keefe for the ACORN story — told TWI that “if recent events conclude that any laws were broken in the incident in Senator Landrieu’s office, that is not something I condone.” Asked for comment on the “race and conservatism” story, neither Olson nor the offices of other Republican congressmen who sponsored the resolution responded. And while a Pew study found that MSNBC spent fully 12 percent of its broadcast time covering the story of O’Keefe’s botched investigation of Landrieu during the week that the news broke, the network has barely touched the “race and conservatism” story. Reached by TWI, several liberal and conservative bloggers who had covered the Landrieu story said that doubts about the details of the Salon story — such as the headshot of O’Keefe that Salon pasted onto a cartoon body — kept them off the trail.

“That article claimed in its subhead to have photographic proof,” said Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com, “and then used an obviously Photoshopped image beneath it. I’m curious as to why that didn’t raise more red flags.”

For Breitbart, the pushback was personal. He has explained in the past that Democratic attacks against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas were the spark that made him a conservative. When Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) died, Breitbart unleashed a stream of tweets attacking him for what he said about Thomas. “Doing to the reputations of Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork what he did to [Chappaquiddick victim Mary Jo] Kopechne,” wrote Breitbart in The Washington Times, “only reinforced his value to the Democrat Media Complex as the memory of his brothers’ more authentic Camelot began to fade.”

On Thursday night, with the doubts about the latest O’Keefe story apparently killing its traction in other media, Breitbart started to have more fun. When the Landrieu story broke, Big Journalism introduced a “senior editor” named Retracto, the Correction Alpaca, a pseudononymous poster who matter-of-factly asked for retractions from organizations that accused O’Keefe of “wiretapping.” In an on-air interview, Breitbart got MSNBC’s David Shuster to retract the charge. And after another day of battling back on the Salon story, Breitbart warned web sites that had mentioned Salon’s story — like The Daily Beast — that the alpaca was making a comeback.

“Tina Brown,” wrote Breitbart, “Retracto is walking down the hillside…”

NASHVILLE — I’ve just arrived for the first annual National Tea Party Convention, but most of the attendees signed up last night, and some have started posting videos from the event. In this one by “davidzdavid,” former congressman Tom Tancredo explains why he came to speak on opening night.

DAVID: You came to the Tea Party Convention because they asked you?

TANCREDO: Well, sure! I didn’t have $500 for a ticket! Only way I could get in this room was to be a speaker!

Watch it below the jump:

On Wednesday, I wrote a post reacting to Max Blumenthal’s story “James O’Keefe’s Race Problem” and was too quick with a description of the August 30, 2006 Robert Taft Club event on “race and conservatism.” Specifically, I wrote this:

A zoomed-in headshot of James O’Keefe (after the jump), then working for the Leadership Institute, survived, although it cropped out the table he was sitting at, covered in controversial literature.

In a later post, I walked this back: While I’d been at the event, it was Isis, a photographer/investigator for the One People’s Project, who told me that her photo was actually a picture of O’Keefe at a table of controversial literature. But several e-mailers and commenters have pointed out that my first post appeared to endorse Blumenthal’s whole story. I want to quickly walk through that story and point out the parts that, based on my experience at the event and interviews with Isis and event organizer Marcus Epstein, were not true.

1) OPP has a “photo of O’Keefe at a 2006 conference on ‘Race and Conservatism’ that featured leading white nationalists.”

As Epstein’s August 28, 2006 post on the nativist site VDare.com makes clear, it was a two-hour debate, not a conference. I made this clear in my initial post. The only “white nationalist” onstage was Taylor. John Derbyshire has some controversial views on race, but co-panelist Kevin Martin is and was, as Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism delights in pointing out, African-American.

2) “The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance.”

Taylor, who is incredibly controversial — and pretty nakedly racist — was the source of the event’s controversy, but he was only one of three speakers.

3) “Together, O’Keefe and Epstein planned an event in August 2006 that would wed their extreme views on race with their ambitions.”

O’Keefe has denied any role in planning the event, and Epstein has backed him up. In an interview yesterday, Isis told me: “I don’t believe O’Keefe planned the event.”

4) “A speaker from the right-wing black front group Project 21, founded by white conservative David Almasi to shill for corporate clients and provide cover for conservative politicians, was added at the last minute.”

Kevin Martin and Project 21 have pushed back against this on their own, but I also asked Epstein when he invited Martin to join and balance the panel. He forwarded me this email, dated August 1, 2006 — 29 days before the event.

5) “According to One People’s Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O’Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism.”

This is Blumenthal’s sourcing, but according to Larry O’Connor of Big Journalism, Jenkins cited me as a “witness.” I talked to Isis, not Jenkins. And I never told anyone that O’Keefe had “planned” the event or “manned” the table, because I could not confirm those things. I did tell Isis, after seeing her photo of O’Keefe, and hearing her description of the event — and remembering her walking around, taking photos — that her photo definitely jogged my memory of O’Keefe being there. And O’Keefe has confirmed that he was there.

In my original post, I wrote that “O’Keefe’s position at the Leadership Institute gave him some ownership of the event, but in general the crowd consisted of conservatives and libertarians who wanted to see some controversy.” What I meant was that unlike the reporters in the room or the college students watching the spectacle, O’Keefe was Epstein’s co-worker. He didn’t wander in off the street — he knew his colleague was planning an event, knew it was so controversial it was moved out of the building, and he tagged along. But to some readers, that sentence suggested that O’Keefe was, indeed, a planner of the event. He absolutely wasn’t.

I stand by the rest of my description of the event in my original post. But later that day, as Breitbart started pushing back against the story, I wrote: “I’m curious to see what Breitbart goes after — I was at the 2006 event that leads Blumenthal’s story and can confirm all the details about it.” That was sloppy phrasing — I meant that I could confirm all the stuff I’d already written. I had no idea that One People’s Project had told Breitbart’s reporter that I could confirm the facts as presented by them. They should stand by their own story — and they really, really need to produce a full photo of O’Keefe at the event.

I’m really not used to being part of a story like this. In one week, James O’Keefe — who I’ve been writing about for months — has been linked to an organization that gave me a fellowship (the Collegiate Network) and an event I happened to be at in 2006. So I apologize for giving the impression that I confirmed all the details of the OPP and Salon stories, and I’m glad that The Village Voice has clarified its own reporting using my research.

As for my original point that there’s a conservative subculture that indulges in extremist politics with the expectation that no one will find out and care — well, I stand by that, and I think this episode has gone some way toward changing that.

It’s a day of nuclear-strength oppo hits on Dan Coats, the former Indiana senator who’s running for his old job against Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.). The ugliest comes in the form of his work on behalf of Harvest Natural Resources. Why does that matter?

In 2007, when Coats’ firm was still lobbying, company officials inked a deal with the Chavez government that gave a controlling stake in its local operations to Venezuela’s state oil company. Harvest retained about a third of the revenues generated in the country, according to a Reuters report from the time.

In addition to its 60 percent share, Chavez’s socialist regime collects more than half of Harvest’s income in taxes, according to news accounts.

Reid Wilson has the rest of Coats’ clients from his lobbying career, including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

I just got off the phone with Marcus Epstein, the conservative activist who organized the “race and conservatism” debate in 2006 that has become a flash point of debate since a photo surfaced of James O’Keefe in the audience. (Like I’ve said before, I also attended the event.)

“I’ve made mistakes, which I paid for and addressed,” said Epstein, who has mostly ceased political activity since the 2009 revelation of his arrest in Georgetown. “I don’t want them to be used in false, guilt-by-association smears against others. I met James O’Keefe a number of times. It’s the Beltway — it’s a small circle. It’s the conservative movement. But he did not collaborate with me, definitely not on that event.”

Epstein went into the background of the event and forwarded me emails that he says he exchanged with Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist American Renaissance magazine. He was, at the time, working at the Leadership Institute, as was O’Keefe.

“At that time, I was the only person involved with the Robert Taft Club,” said Epstein. Other Taft Club organizers like Daniel McCarthy (now of the American Conservative) joined later when he organized larger events with speakers like Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) — by that time, said Epstein, O’Keefe had left LI and Washington.

Marcus Epstein (left) at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 1, 2007 (Photo by: Dave Weigel)

According to Epstein, LI did not fund the event — the only outside group to aid with Taft Club events was the American Cause, where Epstein worked from 2006 through 2009. The event was originally scheduled to take place inside of the Leadership Institute, but was moved across the street after police — who, said Epstein, had been monitoring the One People’s Project investigative reports on the event — warned LI to expect protesters. Epstein paid $250 of his own money to rent a new room, and offered to pay the travel expenses of the speakers: Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire and Kevin Martin. Derbyshire, who was coming from New York, declined Epstein’s offer. (Derbyshire, who is or was a member of a controversial listserv on “human biodiversity,” appeared at another Taft Club event in 2007.) Apart from that, Epstein paid for pizza by “passing a hat around.” The literature table that has attracted so much attention was not, he said, set up by the Taft Club. Much of the 40-odd member audience was composed of LI interns and staffers who’d heard about the event at work.

Epstein stood by the content of the event, describing it (accurately, in my view) as a debate, not a forum for Taylor. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the event,” said Epstein. “Jared Taylor has debated Queen Latifah and [anti-racist writer] Tim Wise.” At one point, remembered Epstein, Derbyshire laid into Taylor’s tactics and racism, calling him a “sower of discord” and remarking that “we know where sowers of discord end up” — that is, hell.

“I thought that was a bit extreme,” said Epstein, “but there’s nothing wrong with having a debate.”

Epstein acknowledged that his dabbling in extremist politics, and his 2007 arrest, had made him a sort of toxic figure.

“I’m used to being smeared, and these guys have more or less successfully harmed my career, so I don’t see what else they could do to me,” said Epstein. “A lot of stuff they said about me wasn’t true, but I definitely made a few mistakes. I just don’t want anyone to use me to smear James O’Keefe.”

Daniel Tencer reports that ACORN is encouraging supporters to write letters to attorneys general demanding investigations of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles — a campaign they’ve dubbed “sting the stinger.”

Meanwhile, as O’Keefe and his allies push back on Max Blumenthal’s story about the 2006 “race and conservatism” debate that he (and I, as a reporter) attended, it’s interesting to read this attack on National Labor Relations Board member Craig Becker from Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center.

The sensational headline: “Becker Lied to McCain.” The context: McCain asked Becker if he “perform[ed] work for and provide[ed] advice to ACORN or ACORN-affiliated groups while employed by your current employers or on a volunteer basis,” and Becker said he had “never done so.” Not true, says Vadum!

Evidence abounds that he gave advice to SEIU Local 880, which, as I will show below, was part and parcel of ACORN before it merged with another SEIU bargaining unit.

The evidence:

Local 880 no longer exists. According to “terminal” LM-2 disclosure report (file number 515-963) filed by 880 official Keith Kelleher with the Department of Labor on April 30, the local wound up its affairs on March 31 of last year. It merged with SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana (also known as SEIU HCII).

On the form, Local 880 gave its address as 209 W. Jackson Ave., Suite 200, Chicago, Ill., which just so happens to be in the same building as the national headquarters of ACORN Housing.

Back in the day, SEIU Local 880 was such an important member of the ACORN family of affiliated groups that ACORN listed the local on the “allied organizations” page of its website. The local was included in a list with a select group of major ACORN affiliates such as ACORN Housing and President Obama‘s former employer, Project Vote.

Leaving aside the convoluted logic here, it’s fairly absurd that McCain would justify his months-long hold on Becker by tying him to advising one union affiliated with ACORN at one time. You know who else advised ACORN?

More fallout from the Martha Coakley debacle comes, via Emily Cadei, in the form of the NRCC targeting two House seats in Massachusetts — in a state that has had an all-Democratic delegation since 1997.

How’s the news of Sarah Palin’s upcoming speech at a Tea Party Express rally playing out with some of the Tea Party grassroots? About as well as you’d expect.

“If Sarah Palin thinks Tea Party Express and Tea Party Convention are grassroots,” said Robin Stublen, a Florida organizer with Tea Party Patriots, “then she is as dumb as the liberals say.”

Max Blumenthal’s story about “James O’Keefe’s race problem” leads with an account of an August 30, 2006 after-work event hosted by the Robert Taft Club in Arlington, Va., where John Derbyshire and Kevin Martin joined Jared Taylor — the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance — to discuss “race and conservatism.” Earlier today, I posted my own account of that event and some context about the culture of see-what-we-can-get-away-with political correctness among young conservatives.

Apparently, the One People’s Project is citing me as a corroborating source on the event — but there are aspects of their story I can’t confirm. While their photo of O’Keefe is definitely from the event, I took it on the photographer’s word that O’Keefe was pictured “as he maintained a literature table near the panelists.” I can personally confirm that he was there, but not that he was manning the table — nor that O’Keefe “planned” the event (as Blumenthal put it) with Marcus Epstein, who was president of the Robert Taft Club.

Here’s how I came across the story: On Jan. 27, the photographer (who goes by the name Isis) from the One People’s Project called to ask me if I had any photos of the event. She remembered seeing me there — it was one of several RTC events I attended, including one where Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) spoke. I explained that I didn’t, but compared my version of the event with hers. She told me that she had photos of the event, but the full photos had been taken by the FBI in a raid. All she had on hand were cropped headshots of people who were at the event.

She emailed me the photo of O’Keefe, and I immediately recognized him from the event. And she told me that, unfortunately, the cropping had removed the table he was sitting at, which included copies of American Renaissance magazine. I remembered the table — curious, I’d grabbed a copy of the magazine, which was, of course, incredibly racist — and took her word that the photo showed O’Keefe sitting there. In the photo, after all, we can see a man walking out the door and O’Keefe’s head is much lower than his. But could I personally confirm that O’Keefe was manning the table at an event I attended four years and several phones/cameras ago? Well, no. I suggested that the story didn’t really have legs if O’Keefe wasn’t selling literature or hadn’t planned the event, as, well, people like me had shown up. It was a debate, after all, with two people — one of them African-American — ganging up on the truly ridiculous Taylor.

Fast forward to today and the Blumenthal article. Blumenthal writes that One People’s Project founder Daryle Jenkins was the source for the “manning the table” claim. But I can’t confirm that, because I don’t remember who was at the table at any particular time. All I know is that O’Keefe was there and he was working for LI at the time.

If OPP is able to retrieve its original photo and clear this up, it should do so.

Andrew Breitbart, who’s been absolutely unbowed by the James O’Keefe controversy — quickly turning the story into one of media malpractice against conservatives — is promising a fight against this Salon story on James O’Keefe’s past embrace of in-your-face political extremism.

I’m curious to see what Breitbart goes after — I was at the 2006 event that leads Blumenthal’s story and can confirm all the details about it.

Carly Fiorina’s campaign for U.S. Senate has been trying to make a pretty strong factual argument against challengers Tom Campbell and Chuck DeVore — namely, that both supported a tax-hiking 2005 budget in California. But the reception of a video making the case that Campbell is a “fiscal conservative in name only” around Washington seems to be universal laughter.

I’ve put in calls to the lawyers listed in official documents for the Committee for Truth in Politics, the organization running ads that portray financial regulatory reform as “one big bailout.” One question I have: Is what they’re doing actually legal? Because by all appearances, the Committee is still engaged in legal action against the FEC, the aftermath of its series of 2008 ads against Barack Obama.

Interviewed that year by NPR, the Committee’s attorney, James Bopp — the same James Bopp who drafted the RNC’s “purity resolution” — argued that his group did not believe that disclosure laws were constitutional.

We believe that the U.S. Constitution protects them from having to file that report. The problem is having to file a report at all. To be regulated at all. To be accountable to the government at all.

In January 2009, the Committee filed an amicus brief on behalf of Citizens United, the conservative group that finally won its battle over corporate money in elections this year. I’ve posted that brief below. It’s pretty clear that Bopp’s group, stymied by federal regulations, went dark in late 2008 and turned its fire on the campaign finance infrastructure to make the case that groups buying political ads did not need to disclose their sources of funding. So how did they get off the ground again to run their new ads?

UPDATE: I just spoke with William Peaslee, the attorney who was the registered agent for the Committee in North Carolina. He’s not involved with day-to-day operations, but told me that there was a stay on the Bopp lawsuit until Citizens United came down. And we’ve started to see these ads since that decision came down.

Republicans have done a pretty fantastic job of working the refs and making a political issue out of when Sen.-elect Scott Brown (R-Mass.) will be seated. Before the election, they raised the possibility of delays to gin up conservative support. And before the polls even closed in Massachusetts, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) recorded a video demanding that Democrats seat Brown immediately.

Right now, Brown is demanding that he be seated as soon as he is certified as the winner of the election tomorrow — sending him to the Senate a full week earlier than had been scheduled. The reason, according to his counsel Daniel Winslow, is that “there are a number of votes scheduled prior to that date.”

Because Brown is going to fill a seat left vacant by the death of another senator, there’s not a ton of direct precedent here. But the last man elected to the Senate (we’re not counting interim Sen. Paul Kirk) did not get this speedy treatment. Last year, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won a lengthy legal battle that certified his victory on June 30. Later that day, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) signed Franken’s certificate of election. It took one full week for Franken to be sworn in, on July 7, more than seven months after he won the first recount of the election.

Brown’s argument that Democrats are moving ahead with votes on nominees — breaking filibusters with the help of Kirk — is compelling. But for those seven months between Franken’s recount win and his certification, the Senate simply operated with 99 senators, and the 41- (then 40-) member Republican caucus was free to filibuster Democratic bills and nominees.

Again, the circumstances of the races are so different — Franken’s slim victory, Brown’s special election — that parallels are going to be imperfect. But this sets up a no-win situation for Democrats. Either they stick to their plan and get excoriated for blocking Brown’s right to serve in the Senate — something Republicans have been ready to argue for a month — or they cave to Brown and seat him, infuriating Democrats who watched Franken sit in limbo for seven months while Republicans blocked vote after vote after vote.

Two great catches by Ben Smith — and more by his commenters — reveal that the little-known Committee for Truth in Politics is running ads that frame proposed financial regulatory reform as, paradoxically, “one big bailout” for banks. The ads are running in Pennsylvania, Montana, North Dakota and Colorado, and they crystallize an attack that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) made against the House’s version of reform, passed in December: that it was a “permanent bailout bill” because it created a closely regulated fund that could be tapped for future bank emergencies. (Frank Luntz used crisper language in a memo to Republicans.)

The ad:

Danny Tarkanian, one of the GOP challengers who’s leading Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the polls, has put together a web video that remembers Ronald Reagan’s 1986 campaign appearance to stump against Reid, and frames the Tarkanian bid as “Reagan’s last campaign.” I don’t usually pay much attention to web videos not backed by ad buys, but this might set a new standard in Reagan worship on the right. At the very least, it’s the most cloying “win one for the Gipper” video since 2006 West Virginia Senate candidate John Raese recycled a 1986 ad that Reagan had cut for him.

Two notes. One, the video inaccurately states that Reid “first ran” for the Senate in 1986. He ran in the Democratic landslide year of 1974, but lost narrowly. Two, Republicans actually lost the Senate in 1986.

Here’s the press release, which Tarkanian sent out on WorldNetDaily’s email list.

Dear fellow conservative,

Glenn Beck has identified our campaign as the Tea Party campaign that can win in Nevada. Why? Because I’m a true conservative, and in the latest poll, I’m crushing Harry Reid by 14 points.

The American Spectator called me “Harry Reid’s Armenian Nightmare.” Why? Because I’m a true conservative, and in the latest poll, I’m crushing Harry Reid by 14 points.

I’m writing because I need your help – to defeat the establishment in my Republican primary, and then to finish Ronald Reagan’s last campaign mission — to DEFEAT HARRY REID.

I want to put the defeat of Harry Reid in proper historical perspective, so I’m releasing a video about a single, critical day: November 3, 1986. It was the last day… of Reagan’s “last campaign.”

Maybe you remember where you were that day. You see, in 1986, Harry Reid first ran for the U.S. Senate, and on that fateful November day, President Ronald Reagan came to Las Vegas to stop him.

Ronald Reagan always knew Harry Reid was a danger to our nation. He told us Harry Reid was a tax and spend liberal. He told us that he opposed a balanced budget.

It took 24 years, but now we’re only months away from achieving one of Ronald Reagan’s final campaign goals: defeating Harry Reid.

But I need your help today. You see, I’m locked in a pitched battle for the conservative soul of the Republican party against a wealthy liberal establishment Republican who is trying to buy the primary with a million dollars.

My Republican opponent just doesn’t get it. Before running for Senate, she was a regular contributor to Harry Reid’s campaigns, and she actually called Harry Reid a “Reagan Democrat.” Even today, she defends Harry Reid’s vote for the bailouts, saying she might have voted the same way herself. With that attitude, you could argue it’s just as important to defeat her as it is to defeat Harry Reid.

The fact is, we are on the brink of finishing the job Ronald Reagan started on that fateful November day, but it will be a hollow victory indeed if we replace Harry Reid with an establishment Republican who defends the bailouts and the tax and spend establishment agenda of Harry Reid.

Let me be blunt. If you are interested in merely changing the name of Nevada’s Senator, I am not your candidate. If you are interested in standing for something – or fighting for a return to the conservative, Constitutional values that made this country great, then I want your help – I need your help NOW in this primary.

Don’t let a wealthy Republican bailouts apologist buy the Nevada primary, and don’t let Harry Reid’s left wing lobbyist money deny us a conservative victory in Nevada.

Join my conservative campaign to defeat Harry Reid in Nevada and together we will realize the dream of Ronald Reagan’s last campaign.

Please watch the video, and contribute today.

Danny Tarkanian

In 2006, I attended an event hosted by the Robert Taft Club, a proudly un-PC debate society run by young conservative activists who worked at the Leadership Institute — Marcus Epstein, Kevin DeAnna — and The American Conservative. They specialized in subjects that would be too controversial for other groups, and the subject of this forum was “whether conservatives should talk about race.” The big draw: Jared Taylor, the politically toxic editor of the openly racist American Renaissance magazine.

The Taylor appearance was buffeted by controversy and moved, at the last minute, to a location a few blocks away from its original location near the Clarendon metro stop in Virginia. It was strange enough to draw out people like me and a photographer for the One People’s Project, who snapped pictures of the attendees, wrote a report — and then, unfortunately, had most of the photos seized by the FBI. A zoomed-in headshot of James O’Keefe (after the jump), then working for the Leadership Institute, survived, although it cropped out the table he was sitting at, covered in controversial literature. O’Keefe’s position at the Leadership Institute gave him some ownership of the event, but in general the crowd consisted of conservatives and libertarians who wanted to see some controversy, some fireworks — not so much of people who agreed with Taylor.

One People's Project

Last week the One People’s Project posted the headshot and an account of the event. Today, Max Blumenthal uses that event as a jumping-off point for a story on O’Keefe’s problems with race. A related story that hasn’t really been written is the acceptance of really extreme racial theorizing — some would just call it racism — among a small segment of the campus conservative movement.

When I talked to many veterans of the same programs that produced James O’Keefe for my story on the more under-the-radar success of the conservatives-on-campus programs, they remembered, not fondly, people like Marcus Epstein who signed up with conservative groups in order to say shocking things about race or immigration. And for several years, Epstein was employed by the Leadership Institute, Bay Buchanan, and Tom Tancredo. His willingness to push the envelope and invite extremists to public forums was seen more as intellectual bravery than as something controversial that would come back to haunt him – until last year.

I’ve known campus conservative activists for a decade, and I know the people who put together the 2006 forum quite well. Extremism — theories about race, right-wing European politics, anti-immigration rhetoric — is seen in these circles as something of a lark. It’s forbidden knowledge. It terrifies liberals. But people like Marcus Epstein and James O’Keefe feel (or felt) like they can get away with playing around in these circles before getting down to serious politics. And once they make that leap — as Epstein did with Buchanan, or as O’Keefe did with his ACORN tapes — the idea of being brought down by controversy is laughable. They’d faced down the Southern Poverty Law Center and won, so what do they have to fear?

Blumenthal’s article is worth reading for the background on O’Keefe’s race obsession at various points in his career. It makes a connection that liberals have had trouble making, between the right’s attacks on ACORN and the organization’s work registering poor, mostly non-white voters. But the new attention on the 2006 Robert Taft Club event suggests that young campus activists with big ambitions are going to find their dabblings in extreme politics coming back to haunt them. In other words, can the tactics conservatives used to attack Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings or Green Jobs Czar Van Jones–digging into their associations, reporting that they attended scary-sounding events, finding out-of-context, radical-sounding quotes from their earlier careers–be used against conservative activists?

The numbers aren’t all in yet, but it looks like 885,268 people cast ballots in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary in Illinois, while 736,137 people cast ballots in the Republican primary. Illinois is one of a few states open registration states where voters can pick any ballot at the polls. So roughly 55 percent of voters chose to vote in the much more contested Democratic primary than the Republican one, sending state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias to run against Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.).

By contrast, in the 2008 presidential contest, 2,038,614 Illinoisans voted in the Democratic primary, most of them for Barack Obama. And 899,422 voted in the Republican primary, most of them for John McCain. So roughly 69 percent of voters picked Democratic ballots over Republican ballots.

What does this mean? Reading primary numbers can be a fruitless exercise — I distinctly remember Michael Barone pouring cold water on Jim Webb’s chances in the 2006 U.S. Senate race in Virginia because so few Democrats voted in his primary — but to miss the fall-off in Democratic enthusiasm in this state since 2008 is to miss something obvious.

Another way of looking at it? Many more people voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 Illinois presidential primary than voted for all of the Democratic candidates combined in this primary — 1,318,234 compared to 885,268.

Rep. Mark Kirk’s (R-Ill.) successful Illinois Senate primary campaign against a truly weak field of GOP candidates is being interpreted as a blow to the “Tea Party movement.” I don’t think it is — it’s clear that Kirk headed off conservative anger by flip-flopping on cap-and-trade (he voted for it then spoke out against it) and swinging hard to the right, loudly asking for an endorsement from Sarah Palin.

The minor embarrassment for Tea Partiers was the campaign of Adam Andrzejewski, a first-time politician who spoke at an April 15, 2009 Tea Party and sold himself, explicitly, as that movement’s candidate.

In the final week of the campaign, he got the same sort of full-court-press boost from online conservatives that Scott Brown did in Massachusetts. RedState claimed that Andrzejewski’s internal polling showed him 2 points down, in striking distance for the win. Gateway Pundit, among other bloggers, scorched the media for not covering Andrzejewski’s 11th-hour endorsement from former Polish president Lech Walesa. On election night, HotAir illustrated its Illinois primary thread with a picture of Andrzejewski, making it clear that he was the movement’s candidate.

Andrzejewski wound up in fifth place out of seven candidates, with 14.4 percent of the vote. Somehow, Illinois voters were able to resist this.

Dana Goldstein reports on the negotiations behind the anti-abortion rights ad that Focus on the Family bought during the Super Bowl on CBS. Quietly, the network figured out a workable script with the conservative group — a level of collaboration that liberal groups aren’t used to.

CBS has said that in the last year, in an acknowledgement of “industry norms,” it loosened previous restrictions on advocacy advertisements, accepting ads that pushed for health reform and environmental activism.

But pro-choice advocates complain the network didn’t publicize the policy change and hasn’t applied it consistently, citing a rejected Super Bowl ad from gay dating Web site ManCrunch.com. According to Schneeberger, Focus on the Family was not aware of an explicit policy change inside the network, either. “It was only last week that they indicated that they changed any policy,” he said.

Read the whole thing.

James O'Keefe and the cover of a recent issue of his old college magazine (YouTube, The Centurion)

When James O’Keefe applied for a grant to fund a conservative newspaper at Rutgers University, he appealed to people like Sarah Longwell. As the senior program officer at the Collegiate Network, she toured campuses across America to help conservative and libertarian students start newspapers or keep their publications running. She “read basically every conservative college paper,” and got to know the sort of people attracted to the unpaid work of right-leaning campus muckraking.

“You always knew when you met a James O’Keefe,” Longwell told TWI. “When I watch the television, and watch him say things like ‘the truth will set you free,’ I think: there’s a certain type of person who’s so obsessed with being in-your-face contrarian, and being famous for it, that he does it without thinking of the consequences. I certainly met people like him in other places.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Few conservative activists went on to achieve the fame O’Keefe did for the 2009 sting he pulled with fellow activist Hannah Giles, posing as a pimp and prostitute inside ACORN offices, and secretly taping the advice they received. In the week since O’Keefe and three colleagues were arrested for apparently tampering with phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), national reporters have trained their eyes on organizations like the Collegiate Network and the Leadership Institute. The CN also gave a grant to the Patriot (George Washington University) and The Counterweight (University of Minnesota-Morris), where O’Keefe’s accomplices Stan Dai and Joseph Basel, respectively, had worked in college. The Leadership Institute employed O’Keefe for a year to train conservative activists; while there, he formed a friendship with Ben Wetmore, another veteran campus conservative who put up the four activists at his home before the Landrieu escapade. But any attempt to make them the faces of conservative college journalism, argued Longwell, would be off-base.

“From what he’s said and what he’s doing, O’Keefe strikes me as an ideologue,” said Longwell. “To use him to define conservative campus journalism is silly.”

Longwell has gained some perspective on this. In 2005, she left the Intercollegiate Studies Institute–the umbrella organization that runs CN–for Berman and Company, a free-market public relations firm in Washington that aggravates liberals with dogged, smart-alecky campaigns against their causes. Also joining Berman was Justin Wilson, once the editor of CN’s paper at the University of Michigan, then another program director at CN. Both later worked with Bret Jacobson, formerly the editor of the CN’s paper at the University of Oregon. (Before she came to CN, Longwell worked at a CN paper at Kenyon College.) In the years since, all three of them helped out with a punchy campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act–legislation that would make it easier for workers to form unions–at Berman’s Center on Union Facts. That campaign included ads that portrayed union organizers as thugs and undercover videos–conducted with more subtlety than O’Keefe, who would pose in costume–that captured union strategists shifting their strategy. One measure of how successful Berman and Company was at frustrating Democrats came when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) angrily ripped up one of the firm’s anti-EFCA newspaper ads in front of a cheering crowd of union workers.

According to activists who spoke with TWI, the experience of campus conservatives who went on to Berman is more representative of the movement’s investment in college journalism than the trials of James O’Keefe, Stan Dai, Joseph Basel and Ben Wetmore. It’s the sort of work that the three latter activists were doing until last week, using their training and connections to become players in the intelligence industry or in conservative activism. For the Leadership Institute, the Collegiate Network, and the National Journalism Center run by Young Americans for Freedom–just three of the conservative training organizations that have operated for more than a generation–the Landrieu debacle was a distraction from a project that had been going quite well. Conservative activists and journalists who’ve come out of those training programs have had a larger, but quieter, impact than O’Keefe. (Disclosure: I edited a CN paper, The Northwestern Chronicle, from 2002 to 2004, and I held a CN fellowship at USA Today from 2004 through 2005.) They’re well-funded–ISI, CN’s parent organization received, $8.3 million in contributions in 2009–and while they don’t release the names of donors, their trustees include American Spectator publisher Al Regnery (ISI), Heritage Foundation president Ed Fuelner (ISI), and GOP strategist Frank Donatelli (LI).

“Every two years or so, somebody writes a story about how conservatives on college campuses have suddenly discovered journalism,” said John J. Miller, an editor at National Review who came there from the same conservative UM paper as Berman’s Justin Wilson, and who hires summer interns from the CN roster. “Still, if you took people under the age of 40 or 45, right-of-center journalists–however you want to categorize them–a lot of them came from these conservative campus newspapers.”

While O’Keefe’s experience with the Leadership Institute has received more attention than his CN grant–and more than the internship Hannah Giles had at the National Journalism Center–the path from campus conservative journalism to D.C. influence is reliable. Before Marc Thiessen wrote speeches for George W. Bush, he was editor-in-chief of the Vassar Spectator. Before the Chamber of Commerce’s James Gelfand was tripped up for an email asking if it was possible to fund a study that would discredit health care reform, he was an editor at the Northwestern Chronicle. They place yearlong fellows at Roll Call, The Hill, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, and USA Today. Last year, the CN’s program expanded to the Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina. John McCormack scored a Collegiate Network internship with Miller on the strength of his work with the GW Patriot–the same paper that produced Stan Dai. From there he got the CN fellowship at The Weekly Standard, and was hired full-time after his fellowship ended. In October 2009 and January 2010, he shifted the momentum of elections in New York’s 23rd congressional district and in Massachusetts by hounding candidates who were blowing off his questions, prompting them to overreact–and suffer from the ugly headlines that resulted.

This doesn’t take much money. The Leadership Institute’s contribution to college papers consists of Balance in Media Grants–once $500, recently raised to $750–to offset the cost of the first issue of a new publication. The Collegiate Network gives out annual grants up to several thousand dollars based on a number of factors, including frequency and quality of publications, and pays stipends for its media fellowships. Media organizations who hire CN fellows are pleased by the results, and not bothered by the O’Keefe story.

“We’ve been quite happy with our CN fellows over the years,” said John Siniff, executive forum editor at USA Today. “Does the O’Keefe story change the way I think about interns from the CN? No.”

In the months after O’Keefe’s ACORN story, he was embraced by the conservative journalism network. He gave a short, well-received speech to the annual Collegiate Network conference, held last year in San Antonio. The Leadership Institute trumpeted O’Keefe’s experience with the group. Since the Landrieu debacle, the praise has mellowed but not disappeared.

“There was a fairly universal celebration that he gave ACORN a black eye,” said Steven Sutton, who manages the college journalism program for LI. “I don’t think it marks a milestone or launch date — we’re not going to be having James O’Keefe Day dinners to mark the day that he busted ACORN.”

“This kind of ’stunt’ journalism requires skill, like an acrobat,” said Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author whose work at the Dartmouth Review in the early 1980s set the tone for decades of conservative campus journalism. “It’s pretty easy to fall off the ropes if you’re stupid about it. The ACORN story ‘worked,’ because the masquerade proved a point about ACORN, but trying to tap a senator’s phones–well, there’s a point where you are breaking the law, and no one is above the law.”
Among conservatives, there’s a consensus that the work of campus journalists, and the connections that the network can give them, won’t be touched by O’Keefe’s scandal. Berman’s David Martosko–who attended Dartmouth with D’Souza, but did not work for the Review–told TWI that campus conservative papers continue to produce smart “contrarians” with exactly the reporting skills and sense of humor that Berman needs.

“For every James O’Keefe,” said Sarah Longwell, “there are 50 serious journalists coming out of these programs.”