This is going to be a very ugly campaign.
John McCain has surrounded himself with advisors and supporters who have their roots in the dirty tricks of the ‘72 Nixon Campaign and every sleazy Republican campaign ever since.
We should know this, but we don’t. We ignore history and research at our peril.
John McCain is preparing one of the sleaziest campaigns in US history and he has selected the worse of the worst to lead it.
I’m talking about Charlie Black. This guy has been destroying our Nation for more than 30 years and now, he owns John McCain.
Black is a creator of our divisive politics.
Black is a creator of the revolving door between government and lobbyist.
Black is a master of the negative campaign.
Standard Black campaign MOs are already in play. The negative viral Obama emails are a classic Charlie Black campaign tactic. He has been doing this kind of stealth dirty trick for decades.
If Black is not behind these emails, it is his life’s work that inspired their creation.
It is time to fight back.
To the jump...
I know that tonight everybody wants to talk about Senator Clinton’s RFK remarks earlier today.
Forget about them.
They do not matter.
The Democratic Primary race is over and Barack Obama is our Nominee for President. It is a fact waiting for the inevitable confirmation of the next two weeks.
Today’s comments by Senator Clinton are part of the final choreography of the end game. It is over the top, but so it goes. I expect nothing less (and nothing more) from her campaign. She has lost. That reality will sink in over time.
And yet, everything from the Clinton campaign is tame, simple and nice compared to what is around the corner. Because John McCain has surrounded himself with Republican scum bags that make Karl Rove seem like a saint.
At the top of the list is Charlie Black.
He has been in the news as of late and it is right that Charlie Black is becoming a lightening rod. He has been in the shadows for far, far too long.
I have found in my research of the Abramoff Scandal that it is critical to dig deep. The scandals that have erupted in the George W. Bush years have their roots in the seventies and eighties. These roots are deep, long and twisted.
We will not end the culture of corruption in Washington until we learn how to expose these roots and dig them out.
Charlie Black is a major root in the Culture of Corruption. He is a creator of the current system.
Jack Abramoff and his entire scandal is just a twisted root branch that grew out of trunk created by Charlie Black and his fellow professional influence peddlers.
Along with his fellow trailblazers—folks like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Karl Rove, Lee Atwater and others—Black perfected the negative attack campaign. They perfected a business model of permanent institutionalized influence peddling. They created a permanent campaign where the roles were always blurred, deniability was always high and the money always flowed.
From time to time they were involved in a scandal or a bit of bad press, but mostly they worked in the shadows.
Their work inspired generations of young College Republicans and snot-nosed right wing warriors to follow in their footsteps.
Grover Noquist, Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff are just a few of the punks who modeled their lives and careers on the pioneering "work" of Black and his network of thieves.
And now Black and his pals are running John McCain’s campaign. In fact, they "rescued" McCain when he was on the ropes a year ago. These are the devils McCain sold his soul to in a vain pursuit of power. This story needs more exposure.
When our media and even the netroots "dig" into a story we often think we went "deep" if we trace people back to the 1990s. Our sense of history is thin. By the early 1990s, most of the weasels currently surrounding McCain had been reinvented as "senior political consultants" or "seasoned political operative". They had become guys who had been in DC so long that everybody forgot how they got to be where they are and the wreckage they left in their wake.
And today they are treated as fresh face guys with little political history. This story in Politico is a perfect example of the way these punks get a free historical pass:
But perhaps the greatest ironies to emerge from McCain’s lobbyist roundup are the people who are enforcing and defending it.
They are campaign manager Rick Davis, who in 2006 took a leave from his lobbying firm, Davis Manafort & Freedman, but whose name is still a big draw on its shingle; and chief political adviser Charlie Black, founder of another of Washington’s biggest lobbying houses.
You might think from reading that story that there is separation between Davis and Black. And that they only came together to help McCain.
If you dig deeper you’ll see that Davis’ partner in his lobbying firm is Paul Manafort who helped Black create the proto-type modern Republican partisan lobbying/campaign consultant firm back in 1980. In December of 1986, the Washington Post provided details about the rise of Charlie Black as a "Hard-Hitting 'Spin Doctor'":
Politics has made Black a rich and influential figure during the Reagan presidency. The political consulting company he founded in 1980 with two other young political operatives, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, has expanded into a lobbying firm and ad placement agency that employs 49 people. Partners in the firm earned $ 450,000 each last year, according to one report that Black asserts was exaggerated.
A list of Black’s employee’s from 1986 would be interesting. I suspect that one would find Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff on the team. It is a hunch, but an informed one. But let that rest for a while. The unexplored connections are between Black and his partners. They had a token Democrat in the firm, but mostly this was a GOP hard edge right wing shop. A partner of the firm who did not make the masthead was Lee Atwater.
Atwater and Black go way back to South Carolina. Their relationship is like the "chicken and the egg", it is hard to tell which came first. So far, it looks like Black was Atwater’s mentor, or at the very least, his colleague from day one.
These guys go way back. A 9-14-86 article in the Washington Post broke down how they ran campaigns:
The shared talent of the three premier GOP campaign strategists -- Lee Atwater, Charlie Black and Roger Stone -- is the calculated ability to seize on the weaknesses of opponents and "drive up their negatives." For Atwater and Black, key training has been in Southern political fights, where the central goal is to drive wedges in what had been a deeply rooted Democratic dominance.
"Republicans in the South could not win elections simply by showing various issues and talking about various issues. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, is a bad guy," Atwater said, describing his approach to elections. "You simply could not get out in a universe where 60 percent of the people were Democrats and 28 percent Republicans, and win by talking about your issues."
McCain knows he can not win by talking about the issues. He needs to make fear of Obama (and the Democrats) the frame for the election. He can only win through fear and the complete embrace of negative campaigning.
And that brings us to the master of the dark arts, Charlie Black.
I have been digging into his background for the last week. He makes Jack Abramoff look like Mother Theresa by comparison and Karl Rove look like a novice. After a few hours of researching Charlie Black, I need a shower, a drink and some time with my six-year old daughter to remind me why it is important to take these weasels on, but I digress.
Roger Stone is Charlie Black’s longtime partner. That name may be familiar because he claimed to be behind
the recent exposure of Elliot Spitzer’s prostitute problem. It could be true.
Stone has been a Republican dirty tricksters for decades.
A June 16, 1989 Washington Post profile on Black’s partner Roger Stone had some details about his early career:
In the fall of 1970, Stone moved to Washington to attend George Washington University. He became president of the District of Columbia Young Republicans. While his roommates were protesting the Vietnam War, Stone says, he was attending meetings of the Young Americans for Freedom. He also volunteered to work for Chuck Colson at the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). He became an assistant to Bart Porter, who helped manage the dirty tricks operations. Under the pseudonym "Jason Rainier," Stone went to Kentucky and recruited a political spy, paying him $5,800 for information on Democratic opponents. He also went to New Hampshire and donated money to the abortive presidential campaign of Rep. Pete McCloskey (R-Calif.) in the name of a left wing group called the Young Socialist Alliance. Stone then drafted a letter to the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader describing the contribution, enclosing a receipt from the McCloskey campaign.
The article goes on to explain how Stone and Black became a team:
After serving as Ronald Reagan's "youth director" in 1976, he became close to conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie. His wife was working for Viguerie at the time.
With his friends Terry Dolan and Charlie Black, Stone formed the National Conservative Political Action Committee, serving as its treasurer. In 1977, he ran for national president of the Young Republicans. Black managed his campaign.
A popular, soft-spoken man, Black is widely thought to be Stone's protector, the man who helped transform him from political pariah to powerful New Right activist. "Somebody could say I was looking after him," Black now says, "But Roger and I are peers. I've never thought of myself as an older brother."
Yeah, and there was more. Much more.
While Stone was working for Nixon in New England, Atwater and Black were learning the game down south. And of course they were all involved in the toxic sleaze also known as College Republicans. A 4-17-85 WP profile of young GOP operators in DC noted:
In the years that followed, these young men threw themselves into the trench warfare of the College Republicans and Young Republicans In 1977, at 25, Stone won the presidency of the Young Republicans in a campaign managed by Manafort.
Four years earlier, Atwater managed the successful campaign of Karl Rove to be president of the College Republicans, defeating John T. (Terry) Dolan, whose drive was run by Stone, Manafort and Black. Black and Stone were the founders of the National Conservative Political Action Committee in 1975, with Dolan.
Yep, they are all in this together.
The April ’85 article went on to say that:
One of the key talents they bring to a campaign is a killer instinct for what is known in the trade as "driving up the opposition's negatives."
"When I first got into this, I became a polling junkie," Atwater said. "I just stumbled across the fact that candidates who went into an election with negatives higher than 30 or 40 points just inevitably lost. One of the conclusions I've reached is that in a two-man race, if one of the candidates can't win, and the other one is yours, you are going to come out all right."
In 1978, this translated into the Atwater-designed destruction of Charles D. (Pug) Ravenel, the Democratic nominee challenging Thurmond.
"I got a call from Roger Stone, who had found a story in a little publication in New York called something like The Village Thing," Atwater said. "Ravenel had gone to a Park avenue fund-raiser without realizing that any press was there. The story said: 'Pug Ravenel, appearing at a plush penthouse party of limousine liberals and Porsche populists, said he was embarrassed to be from South Carolina and that he would make a good third senator from New York.' I felt like a guy standing on top of a 20-story building and seeing a $100 bill."
Atwater persuaded a dissident Democratic state senator to do a television commercial telling South Carolina voters: "This year we've got something more important than party. We need Strom Thurmond, instead of a third senator from New York."
Ravenel's negative rating went from 12 percent at the start of the campaign to 43 percent on Election Day.
Similarly Black, who served as campaign strategist for Gramm's successful fight for a Texas Senate seat against Democrat Lloyd Doggett in the recent election, recalled:
"Doggett got the endorsement of the big gay PAC in San Antonio. That wasn't unusual, but then we got onto the fact that the gays had a male strip show at some bar and Doggett takes that money. That became a matter of his judgment, so we rolled it out there."
That type of attack is a signature of every campaign Black has been involved in. A thin, thin connection is blown up into a "major campaign turning point". These are always a wedge and/or a smoke screen crafted to avoid any discussion of any issue of substance.
There is a lot of sleaze coming. Get ready.
In a December 1986 WP profile of Black his campaign style was described as:
He once was executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student group, and was founding chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, one of the New Right's most controversial groups. He was part of the management team led by John Sears that Reagan fired after the 1980 New Hampshire primary, and he accepts responsibility for a decision that had Reagan all but ignore the Iowa precinct caucuses -- a move that almost cost Reagan the GOP nomination. Yet Black, four years later, was accepted back into the Reagan fold as a senior consultant.
Black is a firm believer in the kind of hard-hitting negative television advertising that became NCPAC's trademark in the late 1970s and rose to a vicious art form in Helms' 1984 reelection campaign. "I don't see any evidence that negative advertising doesn't work," he said the night of Hawkins' defeat.
Black campaigns are typically rough-and-tumble affairs. He says he feels most comfortable with underdog candidates. His candidates play tough, sometimes bending the truth to their political advantage.
And yes, you can already see Black bending truth in the McCain campaign. "Bending" is the wrong word. Twisting, warping and destroying are better descriptors of the standard Black campaign tactics.
Is Black behind the email smears? I do not know, but I do know that they fit the standard MO of a Black run campaign. He wins by any means necessary and then trades on the connections to sell his influence to the highest bidder.
It is a game he has been playing for thirty years. It has been a very profitable game for Black and his fellow travelers.
It is time for a quick discussion about the difference between your standard lobbyist and Charlie Black.
A professional lobbyist hires him or her self out to make the case of their client to members of Congress and the Executive Branch. This is protected speech in the Constitution. If lobbyists were restricted to this narrow definition, they would not have the power they have today in Washington. But today a lobbyist is a lot more. Aand we have Charlie Black to thank for that.
It was Charlie Black who first saw the potential of the permanent revolving door.
In 1980 he was working on the Reagan Campaign. By New Hampshire it was clear that things were looking up for Bonzo’s co-star. Black left the campaign and started a lobbying firm. It would become Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. During the 1980 campaign partners Paul Manafort and Roger Stone continued to work for the Reagan Campaign as "consultants". After the campaign Lee Atwater would join the firm and become a rich man.
Black’s innovation was the permanent campaign and the permanent revolving door. Everybody in Black’s firm could move easily between running a campaign and then lobbying the folks they helped to elect. To add confusion, Black and his staff could also be members of the government for the candidates they elected if it served their purposes.
For more than30 years Black has been selling influence—trading on the connections he has made working on campaigns. A May 24, 1987 New York Times article described it this way:
Black, Manafort & Stone was taking on so many ostensibly nonpolitical clients that in 1985 it divided itself into two distinct (albeit overlapping) entities. Campaign Consultants Inc., a seven-person operation, handles only domestic Republican clients; two of its partners, Roger Stone and Charles R. Black Jr., are personally ''volunteering'' their services to Rep. Jack Kemp's Presidential campaign, according to Mr. Stone, and partner Lee Atwater is managing Vice President George Bush's presidential race as an individual project. The principals of Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, on the other hand, do partisan work for both Democrats and Republicans, and do consulting and lobbying for corporations, trade associations and foreign governments. CRITICS, and some consultants, claim that the only thing these strategists have to offer corporate clients is access to their political clients. The New Republic, noting the Stone firms' political contacts as well as their $100,000-per-year representation of Kamen Aerospace and $6,000-a-month contract for Salomon Brothers, labeled Roger Stone ''the state-of-the-art Washington sleazeball.''
In 1989 an investigation into a Reagan era HUD scandal focused on the way Black’s firm operated. On June 21, 1989 the Washington Post caught Black’s longtime partner Paul Manafort explain just what the firm di for a living (emphasis added):
Paul J. Manafort, a prominent Republican political consultant and campaign adviser to Presidents Bush and Reagan, told a congressional committee yesterday that he engaged in "influence-peddling" three years ago when he used his Washington contacts to obtain a potentially lucrative federal housing contract.
"The technical term for what we do -- and law firms, associations and professional groups do -- is lobby," said Manafort, a partner in the firm Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly. "For the purposes of today, I will stipulate that, in a narrow sense, some people may term it influence-peddling."
The lobbying firm was paid $ 326,000 for its work on behalf of the project in rural Upper Deerfield Township, N.J. And Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Government Operations subcommittee on housing, estimated that federal subsidies, tax breaks and rehabilitation costs on the development could ultimately cost the federal government $ 47 million.
Manafort's role in obtaining the federal funds -- similar to that of other prominent Republican officials involved in the Department of Housing and Urban Development's moderate rehabilitation program -- was criticized yesterday as benefiting a project that was ill-planned, expensive and unneeded..
And an August 12, 1989 Washington Post article had Charlie Black explaining the way he works his former campaign clients (emphasis added):
Black contends that there are no ethical problems in lobbying public officials for whom the consulting firm has worked, or in lobbying the huge network of Bush and Reagan campaign workers who have gotten jobs in the administration.
"In the administration, everybody in a presidential campaign is a prospect for getting a job in the government, but you are working with these people on a peer basis or sometimes they are your superiors. It is not like I hired [Commerce Secretary and Bush campaign finance chairman] Bob Mosbacher and gave him his start in politics so he owes me once he's in government," Black said.
Instead of posing an ethical question, Black Manafort Stone & Kelly regards lobbying former campaign officials now in government and candidates elected to public office with the partners' help as opportunities to provide better service to its clients. "I think there is a great advantage in dealing with people who you personally know and trust . . . most importantly, [the question is] can they [officials] trust you [the lobbyist] to tell the truth . . . . I think there is an advantage to the client and to the person in position of authority to deal with someone they know and trust," Black said..
The McCain campaign is just a long-term jobs welfare program for sleazeballs like Charlie Black.
Black is a creator of our divisive politics and how lobbying is destroying Washington. He is the role model for Jack Abramoff.
Black’s client list is long and he has run some of the dirtiest campaigns of the last thirty years. He is a punk: plain and simple. Today, he is McCain’s chief punk and patron.
We need to keep the pressure on McCain to fire Charlie Black and all the lobbyists working on his campaign. These are people, who, like Black, have built an industry of "buying" politicians during a campaign and cashing in once they are in office.
McCain is bought and a prisoner of the culture of corruption. He must be defeated.
It is time to force a wedge between McCain and the lobbyists who own him.
Check out the petition at Campaign Money Watch and demand that McCain Fire the Lobbyists!
There is so much about Charlie Black and his den of thieves that I just can not get it into one Dairy. If you want to help me spread the word, then drop me an email.
It is time to clean up Washington and getting rid of McCain, Black and the GOP gang would help us "air out" the place.
As long as they are in the game, they will play dirty. We need to be ready for that.
You may be a bit miffed at Senator Clinton tonight. Fine, but set it aside. Whatever she has done is pale when compared to what is coming. Get ready.
The real attacks are just around the corner and they are coming from the sleaziest campaign in recent memory: The McCain Campaign run by Charlie Black.
Get ready to fight.
We have a country to take back.
2008 is now.
Cheers