Every dime of the $500-million-a-year that powers the GOP propaganda engine moves outside the campaign contribution limits. Some is tax deductible. Some is foreign.
Corporate Politics, Inc. is the GOP's largest ad agency and its Propaganda Ministry. There's a Cap Hill nickname: the Powell System.
Joe Coors wrote the first check to start the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Ever since, this Powell System has been a stellar investment. Bush tax cuts redistributed more than $1-trillion. Federal privatization and the "defense" and DHS budgets make these people even richer.
Diary focuses on FOLLOW THE MONEY and on the GOP use of a live piece of tactical psychology: Natalie's Memes.
Republicans, today, have a big problem: they have been useless for the "Lost Decade" of 2001-2010. In Mass., Powell System campaign sharks flipped this around.
This is one cool, innovative combo-attack. Natalie's Memes can be pounded 50x24x7.
Build pro-democracy opposition to the Powell System ??? A pro-democracy counter to Natalie's Memes ?
Case Study and pics BTF :::
MONEY IS POWER
The GOP is a business.
It works for large corporations and for wealthy Righties who pay for its services. Over the years, the really big money goes to the GOP's propaganda machine.
-- The Powell System has received more money than all of the contributions to all of the GOP's political campaigns, combined.
-- Since 1972, the total investment is high side of $10-billion.
Powell System resources are similar to a massive Wall Street Journal, spanning hundreds of organizations and 20,000 direct political employees. Add the religious Fellow Travelers and its 50,000 full-timers.
Still, despite the size, when a novel tactical opportunity presents, the Powell System experts on a campaign team can turn on a dime. They are more than happy to bash a pro-democracy candidate with their Ad Biz takes on Shock and Awe:
When was the last time that the Democrats went with audacity: threw a bimboy into the ring, covered over an empty resume, slandered a career public servant as a culture-troll, and stole a Senate seat in the heart of conservative territory ?
Democrats continue with "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" incomprehension. They blame their own, issue polls, and say "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy."
Squaring up to the Powell System -- quantifying its size and scope -- never quite happens. Top management for the Dems never gets to first base.
Howard Dean made a go at it. Dean has a feel for projects that combine knowledge and thoroughness. But today, DNC has not continued the long-term work to flesh out his "50 State Strategy."
DNC muddles on with no central organizing principle.
Considering the Natalie's Memes tactical opportunity -- presented in detail, below -- this relative disparity between RNC and DNC could move 5% of the 2010 elections.
There is nothing shy about what we see from these guys. For example, GOP candidates are now recruited similar to pharma sales reps:
Throw in a pick-up truck for the union vote and here you go. "America's Sexiest Man."
Any question who the sharks are ?
The Powell System is tasked, today, to move America to corporatism, to status as another China, to modern fascism. They do indeed memorize Sun Tzu and they see politics as war. Not an allegorical form of war, but war.
THE GOP'S "LOST DECADE" OF USELESSNESS
Scott Brown was rebranded to make him resemble an Independent.
Worse, Brown's resume showed that "America's Sexiest Man of 1982" had never done a lick of real work. After law school, he occupied political positions and did light duty. He used his degree to do property appraisal.
The GOP lineup, today, is like so many Scott Browns:
-- The party has not generated even one important, useful program in more than a decade.
-- Republican candidates, to the man, have a problem showing anything that they have done to earn votes.
And then along came Jones... Tall thin Jones... Slow walking Jones....
NATALIE'S MEMES
It's not exactly a "Jones," here. Its White.
Natalie White faced pretty much the same problem as the GOP. She was a player on the reality television show Survivor Samoa. Natalie got toward the end of Survivor and had done nothing to earn votes.
It's not that she was a one-girl Party of No.
Natalie was lazy.
Natalie had not worked around camp, not done much on challenges, not found food. She was so physically lazy about finding food that she was starving on a tropical island -- she dropped 20 pounds in 39 days.
She attached herself to one strong player, Russell Hantz, and kept breathing. Then her application of Natalie's Memes made all the difference.
Whining and Special Pleading.
Natalie developed a political novelty: a unique pattern for a combined attack:
1.) Whining. Her future voters were encouraged in subtle, framed sessions to whine about the main rivals. Natalie's remarks during these sessions presented moderate positions. The pay-off is that she was able to inject derogatory ad hominem details. Her future voters were especially receptive, given the nature of their own mental activity.
2.) Special Pleading. Natalie's role as listener/encourager was enhanced to do double-duty. Getting the victory resulted from a disciplined form of an informal fallacy called Special Pleading. Natalie communicated a broad variety of associations with traditional virtues. While her future voters were whining about the stronger players, she used repetition to embed memes that elevated her own image. The prime goal was to establish that she was intrinsically deserving.
During the final voting session Natalie was very lightly criticized for doing nothing to earn votes. In effect, the concept and the whole process of earning votes was put to sleep.
As you can imagine, this disciplined combo-attack is solid gold for today's GOP.
Natalie also cast her rivals as aloof, uncaring, not connected, out of touch.
Natalie's professional smile -- her pharma sales rep friendliness -- translated to a negotiable asset. Same for Scott Brown. She was a Prayer Warrior. She claimed to be broke.
Any form of team work or in-game accomplishment ??? Irrelevant.
"What rises must converge" sounds pretty.
What wins... really does converge.
Scott Brown's "surge" came when his team went over from tax-cuts-and-freedom to the full force of Natalie's Memes. The Mass. sports-talk shows amplified the whining pattern and then both Brown and Curt Schilling hammered in the character slams.
One beauty of Natalie's Memes is that the whine-and-slam shit-storm only needs to peak for a couple of days -- for the election. Perfect for the outside-the-campaign resources of the Powell system.
Natalie White is a prime example of what the pharmas send in to doctors' offices. That is one of the country's highest-stakes poker games.
Tell me the GOP is not recruiting knock-offs of the pharma sales force professionals... knock-offs of Natalie the Magnificent:
The pharmas are not copying the GOP; the GOP is copying the pharmas.
THE POWELL SYSTEM
The broad unquestioning enthusiasm for Sarah Palin and this willingness of rich Righties to give hundreds of millions of dollars to the Powell System are fruits from the same tree.
The Money.
A dozen conservative foundations spread around more than $100-million a year. Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch and Claude R. Lambe charitable foundations, the Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Altogether the foundations and private sources top $300-million a year. Corporations add another $200-million.
$500-million a year. These are nonprofits. It is perfectly legal. Many are tax deductible.
The Big Think Tanks.
Heritage Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, George Mason University (the Mercatus Center), the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Hillsdale College, Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, Judicial Watch, the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. The lists get to hundreds of operations, each drawing in more than a million dollars a year.
Not a dime counts against campaign finance laws.
The Powell System has 5,000 people working, just at the Think Tanks. Double that for the issues houses and the regionals, another 10,000 bodies around the country. Then between the conservative Foundations and the conservative shops inside universities and participation of corporate marketing shops, you've got another 5,000 on call. That gets to 20,000 people -- which I think is light as a guesstimate.
If you include the religious groups as Fellow Travelers, the number has to be 50,000.
When the many thousands of Think Tank and issues group employees work on campaigns and do candidate development assignments and do opposition research, its off the clock.
Just time off, don'tcha know.
HOW THE POWELL SYSTEM GOT STARTED
I knew Paul Weyrich back in the day. He had founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973, along with Ed Feulner and a pile of money from Joseph Coors. During the 1980s he and Ed were just as pissed as we were at irrational Federal projects -- and then the bizarre deficit spending that G.H.W. Bush ran up.
Paul was able to get the Coors money because Lewis Powell -- in 1972 a judge, then elevated to SCOTUS by President Nixon as an Associate Justice -- had written up a strongly worded call for Republicans to circle the wagons and finance a coordinated array organizations.
Here is the text: The Powell Memorandum.
Powell also developed an interesting vein of paranoia. He related the upheavals of the 1960s and the tail of the Vietnam protests in the early 1970s to all-out revolutionary assault on the American Free Enterprise system.
Give it a 90-second rewrite and the Rightie ultra-rich fall for it every time.
During the 1980s, Heritage grew to a staff of over a hundred.Frankly, one thing the Democrats need, now, is their own Paul Weyrich.
Not Everything Was Bad.
By 1994, Paul's guys worked on what became Newt Gingrich's Contract with America.
A number of these proposals were actually bipartisan. "Zero Base-Line Budgeting" was in there. It is pretty much the same idea, in practice, as Pay-As-You-Go.
There was also no wiggle for "Black" private armies or a Congress with no labor rules. Newt Gingrich wasn't a bad guy for getting this proposed. He was able to implement about 1/3 of it.
Matters have gotten worse rather than better over the last 16 years.
FROM REFORM TO CORPORATISM
The Contract with America was about the end of simple good works. The Far Right and the militarists had decided to take a confident, largely Christian, at heart isolationist country and use it to make an empire.
Big Oil knew what it wanted. Wall Street had its agenda. Massive fraud "McAllenization" of medical insurance was on the horizon.
Busing school children to strange schools to force integration had killed Liberalism -- the dumbest political idea of the Twentieth Century. Worse than Prohibition.
Busing gave us the Reagan presidency and then G.H.W. Bush. With the centerist Liberals bashed flat, the G.O.P. Base got dragged over to Lee Atwater's Angry White Males.
From there, the Powell System shops found themselves supporting horrors:
-- Phil Graham destroying the Depression Era protections for the banking system
-- The Hoover Institute calls for "another Pearl Harbor"
-- The bait-and-switch scheme for invading Iraq
-- Setting up the MediCare/Medicade payables system to facilitate fraud
-- The very engine for military takeover that is Blackwater/Wi.
MANAGING
DNC retains a tiny research operation related to Howard Dean's "50 State Strategy." I do mean tiny. DNC has a half-dozen people to cover the country and no idea what to do.
DNC has no permanent maangement, no independent quality control. There is no commitment to either thoroughness or high-quality.
No one was fired for XXXXXXX Mass.
For example: despite having the 60-vote Senate supermajority at stake, DNC let Hillary Clinton's local organization in Mass. take the critical positions in Coakley's campaign. Compared to the Powell System crew up there, amateurs.
No quality control, no quality.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
The Powell System research operation got built out in force from Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition. He canvassed every single Fundie church in the country -- from the megachurches to store fronts in Black Detroit. His people talked to 25,000,000 church people face-to-face. Pushed shared ideas, took names. Built a precinct-level database of the country.
The labor unions had detailed databases for their members and families. Big city political machines had their people organized. but before Reed, nobody realized that you could do the same XXXXXXX thing for the whole XXXXXXX country.
Reed shared his database freely with other Powell System operations.
Ralph Reed's sorriest little preacher/volunteer_leader with a 100-member No Denomination storefront is likely to have a good understanding of turning out his voters. This preacher/volunteer_leader is surely a valuable resource.
CAMP WELLSTONE
On the pro-democracy side, Camp Wellstone is one of the better shops.
HERE is Camp Wellstone
Camp Wellstone shows what you can do to support campaigns -- despite that you have no extended system to aggregate resources.
Will Rodgers got it right: "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
CW deserves better. At the least, CW should have coordinated support available to produce campaign materials that are customized for the target regions and for the expected opposition candidates.
DNC can do one helluva lot better.
CONQUERING AND BLUNDERING IN MASSACHUSETTS
There is no sharper example for the impact of Powell System strategic management than the recent senatorial campaign in Massachusetts. Two factors predominated:
- Candidate recruitment -- including training, development, marketability testing, and the practical factors that get lumped together under "work ethic."
- Campaign design -- the Powell System shops had had a years long research effort going, aimed to win the first post-Teddy Kennedy Senate race. This effort turned up chunks of campaign gold -- for example: the JFK tax cut clip that was used to jump start Scott Brown's race.
"Populist Anger" -- a brilliant, brilliant marketing discovery.
This phrase was the trigger for whine-and-slam sessions modeled on Natalie's Memes.
The original form was "Conservative Populism". Not half bad.
Anger can be managed.
"He Is Out Of Touch" -- the carry-over to attack Obama. That worked fine in 1994. 2010 is GOPer recycling.
Here's the GOP recruitment operation's product.
Cosmopolitan picked a winner in 1982. HERE for their web page.
Yes, you can get clothes on him.
Here is immediate spread-out of the Brown campaign:
"Republicans... want to know the strategies his team adopted to trounce the Democrat from its bastion. ...Republicans praised Brown for the historic win. A Hawaii congressional candidate... "Scott Brown has certainly put a lot of wind in the sails of my campaign," said Charles Djou of Hawaii."
Guarantee you, "Populist Anger" at the hard working but newly undeserving Democrats... is going to get big play from Maine to Hawaii.
STRATEGY AND TACTICS FOR DNC
Top level strategy matters.
DNC needs to apply the Powell System's management principles to coordinate/organize the efforts of left-center foundations, left-center Think Tanks, left-center development resources such as Camp Wellstone, the big unions, and any and all sensible allies.
Immediately: acquire the expertise of the pharma sales training programs. Pro-democracy operations need to get better at developing candidates and other resources.
Then, get over personalizing strategic and managerial factors. The Clintons, for example, get off on the phrase "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy."
Nice try.
But that is paranoia speaking. It is not an analysis. It is not thinking that goes to historical roots, management methodologies, or to the facts of how the Powell System operates.
VRWC memes are essentially uncomprehending. Superficial.
DNC -- IMHO -- will be better off if they can adopt two strategic goals as foundations for work over the next two or three election cycles:
Begin development on a long-term response to the Powell System:
- Adopt the Howard Dean "50 State Strategy" as the permanent and central organizing principle for all political efforts involving the Democratic Party.
Recognize the resource disparity that exists between the Powell System organizations and all of the left and center organizations:
- Adopt a single-point tactical posture aimed at fighting off what I label as Natalie's Memes. The posture will need to be focused to win in 2010, because the Powell System outmans the Democrats by 20:1.
The best defense is a single-point offense. Attack the GOP for doing nothing. Attack the GOP for laziness. Attack the GOP for every bad idea of the Bush Administration. The single point... attack every support for the idea that the GOP is deserving of votes.
The GOP hasn't done a XXXX thing for the country. But do believe it: the Powell System continues to hop right in. They are career professionals.
Politics is about winning. Lewis Powell understood that. So did Paul Weyrich. No one on the Democratic side has had the systemic impact of Lewis and Weyrich. These guys brought permanent change to American politics.
Either you learn Lewis and Weyrich's lessons, or you don't understand the game.
Obama raised $800-million and won. Since then, Obama has ignored structural issues in the Democratic Party. He watched Dean leave DNC and did nothing to enhance what Dean had started. The Powell Memorandum is not in play over there.
Democrats want to win ??? DNC needs permanent management and, especially, Lewis's quality control. Howard Dean was good at that. Dem candidates also need to understand the skills that you see with the pharma sales reps and the GOP's knock-offs.
BullXXXX loses.
Camp Wellstone needs high-quality support. Having the "50 State Strategy" as the organizing principle at DNC is one solid First Step to get there.
Any suggestions ?