The fight, p.14
The Fight, page 14
Many of the well-paid fund-raising professionals we interacted with were of little use in this fund-raising mission because most of them parroted the same line, “Get on the phone and ask for money!” When you are new to the political arena, as either a candidate, or an activist, cold calling potential donors almost always results in humiliation. The responses I received ran the gamut from “Who the hell are you?” to “Never call here again.” I largely abandoned this approach after spending an afternoon in a Washington, DC, office with my former campaign manager and a consultant and, after calling nearly one hundred potential donors, and not receiving one donation, I ended the charade. This was a rude awakening after some early fund-raising successes due to the early media attention my campaign received. This is when I was forced to do what I should have done earlier, call my friends and family and ask for help.
Calling your friends and your family and asking them to financially assist you in what they may perceive as a quixotic political effort, is an uncomfortable experience, but even generating a few small donations from the effort can provide a morale boost to the campaign team. Many of these calls surprised me. People I assumed would be the most helpful, in some cases, were not helpful at all, while some friends who I assumed would be reluctant to help, became my biggest supporters. Another technique we used for generating early money was to ask local supporters and political club members to host free “meet-and-greet” events. While these events were free, it didn’t mean that we could not ask for donations at the event. Convincing potential supporters to invest in me required a compelling presentation and we were always prepared to stay as long as we needed to in order to answer every possible question from a potential supporter. This wasn’t easy because the schedule I kept on the campaign trail was relentless. It wasn’t unusual to attend an early morning parade, an afternoon fair, a local activist event in the early evening, stop at the office, knock on a few doors late in the day, and to then attend a nighttime fund-raiser after the long day. I would be exhausted after giving my speech at these nighttime fund-raisers, but I felt that I owed everyone who gave their time, and showed up at the event, all the time they needed to ask a question or make a comment.
Gratitude also paid off for my campaign and, more importantly, for my feelings about the effort we were putting into our campaign. At the early stages of our fund-raising efforts, I made every effort to call every single donor, regardless of the amount of their donation, and thank them. I once spent an entire weekend sitting in my Chevy Tahoe, in my garage, calling nearly two hundred donors and thanking them for donating to a “money bomb” we put together. It was rewarding listening to the surprise in the voices of many of my $5 and $10 donors who, for the first time as many of them stated, received a personal thank-you call. It also speaks to the pernicious effects of a system dominated by the connected few and their connected friends that many of the people I called had donated before, but never received a call or a thank you. These grassroots donors are frequently lost in the donor pool among the wealthy few who receive all of the candidate’s gratitude and attention.
On the Republican side of the political divide, it was the explosive growth of the Tea Party movement that showed the insider crowd that it’s possible to raise millions of dollars from either a thousand $1,000 donors, or from a million $1 donors. The Tea Party’s ability to bypass the financial gatekeepers of the old-guard establishment Republicans by crowdsourcing funds for non-establishment candidates is where their power has been the most pronounced. Many of these $5 and $10 donors giving to our campaign became $100 and $1,000 donors over time as they got to know me from my thank-you calls and my interactions with them on various social media platforms. A little bit of gratitude goes a long way.
One area where political newcomers (me included) frequently flop is in their acquisition of campaign vendors. When a campaign begins to slowly raise money and accumulate funds in the campaign bank account, they will inevitably receive a number of solicitations from various vendors selling a variety of campaign tools from voter-targeting tools, to apps, to robocall services. Like any other arena, there are really good, and really bad, vendors, and distinguishing between the two is one of the most important decisions a campaign can make. A poor choice in campaign vendors can bankrupt and sink a campaign quickly as they devour your bank account and produce little-to-no results. We had one vendor who was so ineffective that they posted pictures on our social media page with descriptions of a different event, even though the name of the event was in the picture’s background!
The vendors that matter most for the fund-raising portion of political activism and campaigns, surprisingly, are not the fund-raising consultants. As I described earlier, I found most of their advice to be canned “Get on the phone and ask for money” nonsense. The vendors who really matter are those who can provide e-mail list building, and traditional mail fund-raising. Granted, many of these top-tier vendors will look at your Federal Elections Commission filings to ensure you are raising some money before they agree to assist you, creating another, smaller “chicken-and-egg” problem, but if you manage to raise funds from friends and family and smaller events, that should be enough to establish the necessary credibility. We raised most of our campaign funds, during both of my campaigns, from mail and e-mail vendors who were skilled at designing messaging and targeting donors likely to support a campaign such as mine.
Building lists of traditional mail addresses and e-mail addresses, is a tried-and-true method for building a grassroots base of financial support to fund your efforts and, although a network of quality vendors can lead your efforts in accomplishing these list-building goals, your grassroots team must provide the base to build on. Our campaign team rarely attended an event without a clipboard to collect e-mail addresses and home addresses from the attendees. The ability to grow these lists is directly related to your ability to generate funds without having to embarrass yourself on the telephone cold calls. When your e-mail list grows to tens of thousands of names it’s possible to raise thousands of dollars through the click of a mouse with the right message and not have to subjugate yourself to the humiliation of cold calls to potential donors.
Although money is still the grease on the wheel of politics, the information technology age and the growth of social media and ubiquitous e-mail communication has made the barrier to entry to politics easier for an outsider to overcome. Also, money raised from grassroots efforts on social media and through e-mail lists can be used far more efficiently now with the growth of targeted Internet advertising and the diminishing influence of expensive television advertising campaigns. The next generation of content will be broadcast to their audience from mediums such as Hulu, Roku, Pandora, smartphone applications, Web applications, and others. The ability to advertise to a smaller, and more targeted audience, on the aforementioned forums will further enable small, grassroots outsider campaigns to spend their limited financial resources more efficiently as they reduce “messaging waste” to consumers who are either not able, or not interested, in supporting them.
To summarize, technology has brightened the future for activists and potential candidates interested in fighting back against the political status quo, but not interested in paying homage to the establishment gatekeepers in the process. For most our country’s history, prior to the 1970s, the most important election in the land, the presidential election, was largely determined by political party bosses in what could only be described as an “insider’s game.” This nominating process by political party committeemen set the tone for down-ballot races as well and political connections to both connected party leaders, and moneyed interests, were invaluable in determining which names appeared on the ballot. The post-1968 presidential election growth in both the prevalence of primaries, and the media coverage gained from primary victories, combined with the growth in Internet advertising, voter targeting, YouTube, e-mail, and social media has reduced the barriers to entry for grassroots activists and candidates. I see this trend continuing in the future as information becomes cheaper to obtain and easier to disseminate for both candidates and voters. These trends will never eliminate the power of money in elections, but they will reduce its influence.
12
Media Bias: Fighting Back
The hegemonic days of broadcast news and liberally slanted print journalism are coming to an end. The explosive growth in smartphone, and other transportable, technology has ushered in a new era of content delivery that will unbundle the delivery of news from its traditional overseers. Many of us were raised in an era where, if you did not hear it from NBC, ABC, or CBS national and local news outlets, you likely did not hear about it at all. The “it” you didn’t hear about could have been a Conservative candidate, or a Conservative defense or refutation of a policy prescription. Podcasting, Conservative media Web sites, the live streaming of Conservative talk radio, and the delivery of daily content through e-mail lists are just a few of the mechanisms, which will continue to grow and provide information to an audience craving either an ideologically agnostic viewpoint or a Conservative one and, correspondingly, looking to break free from the trappings of the traditional media stronghold.
When you are a new agent to the Secret Service’s Presidential Protective Division, you are typically assigned to the press pool. The press pool is a group of reporters, writers, and photographers who are assigned to cover the White House. Following the press pool around all day, and watching them to ensure they stay “clean” (free of weapons or explosives), teaches the new agents to the President’s security detail how to operate in this high-stress environment, yet it keeps them far enough away from the President to prevent any small mistakes they may make from heavily impacting the security plan. The press pool reporters, writers, and photographers are at the White House to cover nearly everything the President does or says. A few of them, whom I spoke with often, sarcastically called it “death watch” because they were there at all times to ensure that, if something happened to the President, their network wouldn’t miss out on the coverage. Press pool members can rotate in and out over time as their assignments end, but some have been there for extended periods of time. I was never quite sure, based on my numerous conversations with the members of the pool, if it was the best assignment in journalism, or the worst. Their responses to the question, “Do you like working here?” were never milquetoast. They ranged from “I’m done with this” to “I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to be doing this.” Although many of the members of the press pool, who I dealt with on a daily basis, were very pleasant and professional to deal with, their politics were obvious when you got to know them, and many of them defied my expectations. I learned a lot about the media by working as the press pool agent, but it’s what I learned about some members of the media after I left the Secret Service that altered the way I watched the evening news.
Although ideological media bias is a significant problem, it is not the only problem. Many members of the media simply evade or slant the truth, regardless of their personal politics, to garner as many Internet clicks on their stories as they can. One example, which I can personally relate to was the sensational, yet completely phony, December 2014, New York Times story1 about the use of volunteer drivers in the presidential motorcade. The author of the piece Michael Schmidt, seemingly desperate to latch onto the click-bait gravy-train generated by the White House fence-jumper story, which had broken about a month earlier, wrote in the piece: “Volunteers with no special training are a link in the middle of the fastest, and highest-profile, chain of vehicles in the country. They are cheaper than the Secret Service personnel or local police officers who surround them on the road. And their cargo of lowly staff members and reporters is apparently less precious.” This is a statement so devoid of analysis and common sense that Schmidt should have been embarrassed that it made it past the editor, but I don’t think he was. I can’t pry into his memory bank, but I assume he thought he had broken a major story about a pending danger to the President and rushed the story out without really thinking any of it through. First, the volunteer drivers in the presidential motorcade are not “a link in the middle” of the motorcade. Volunteer drivers drive the vans at the end of the motorcade and these vehicles have no direct role in the security plan. Second, it is irrelevant that the volunteer drivers are “cheaper than the Secret Service personnel or local police officers” because neither the Secret Service, nor the local police officers (who are paid by taxpayers), are authorized by the U.S. Code, to protect White House staffers and media members who fill seats in the vans and the press that ride along. If Schmidt is so concerned about the safety and security of his fellow members of the media, then Schmidt should lobby The New York Times to finance the training of a fleet of drivers to service them. In addition, Schmidt’s comment about the White House staff and the press being “less precious” cargo are extremely disingenuous. Schmidt works for a major American newspaper, The New York Times, and as an employee of the Times, I find it hard to believe that he was unaware of this practice before he decided to write the piece. Notice when the piece was published: December 25, 2014. Notice anything significant about the publication date? The Christmas season is a notoriously slow news time and good material is hard to come by during the holidays. How is it that a member of a major media outlet, which has had members inside the “scandalous” volunteer motorcade for decades just discovered around the Christmas holiday that this was a major security threat worthy of his paper’s coverage? This is complete nonsense. There are only two possibilities here. The first is that Schmidt knew about the volunteer drivers, considering his employer had its employees or associates in those vans, with those volunteer drivers, and he was desperate for a story and wrote it anyway. Or, he didn’t know about the volunteer drivers, failed to do any homework, or even a small degree of background research on the story, and slipped it past an editor who missed it. There really is no other scenario that makes sense. This supposedly scandalous story is but one example of how the media can create a scandal at will and cost people both time and money, leaving nothing but reputational carnage in their wake.
As their audience slowly abandons the traditional media overseers, and turns to more ideologically diverse platforms, the old-guard media have been stubbornly resistant to admit their ideological bias and change their direction. Traditional print newspapers are hemorrhaging cash and many are either in bankruptcy or rapidly approaching it, yet they cannot seem to do the obvious; change direction! Circulation is decreasing at a geometrically growing rate and ad dollars, the foundation of the print media income stream, are drying up as ad buyers witness the industry’s collapse. As reported by Ken Doctor, an analyst focusing on the economics of media:
Put a few numbers together and we can see that newspapers take only about 8 percent of all digital ad spending, a share that’s clearly in decline. In the old pre-Internet world, newspapers took about 20 percent of overall ad spending. Those two numbers are another shorthand method to understand the destruction of the industry’s core business, as advertising once supplied 80 percent of the industry’s revenues and nearly all its profits.2
Diversifying the editorial and reporting teams at these traditional media outlets would be an obvious first step toward attempting to reclaim some of their lost audience, but as I experienced during my political campaigns and during my time dealing with the press as a Secret Service agent, their commitment to a left-leaning ideology is a near-religious one that disregards the simple economic writing on the wall. When you decide to enter the arena of politics through either a campaign or as an activist, you must be prepared to deal with this ideological slant and the techniques and strategies biased outlets use to spread it. At some point during your campaign or your activism, you will likely find yourself in front of an editorial board of a major newspaper as I frequently did. Each time I sat down at the seemingly ubiquitous boardroom-type table, in front of these editorial boards, I clearly understood that the board members already had the answers to the questions they were going to ask me. Their endorsement determination was contingent, not on the evidentiary basis of my answers, but the degree to which I complied with their preconceived notion of what the answer should be. For example, while interviewing with a major national newspaper editorial board member regarding tax policy, I was dumbfounded at his resistance to basic historical facts on tax revenue, which any person with access to the Internet could easily verify. This board member asked me how the federal government would be able to raise the tax revenue it needed if, as I suggested, we lowered income and corporate tax rates. When I pointed out to him that vast amounts of easily accessible, historical data conclusively demonstrate that tax rates and tax revenues do not necessarily move in the same direction, he was apoplectic. He insisted that if the federal government were to lower tax rates on individuals, and American businesses, that the tax revenue to the government would decrease, despite any real evidence to support these claims. When I stated to him that a century of American economic data on the effects of tax cuts, under both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations ranging from Calvin Coolidge to John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, provided conclusive evidence of tax revenue increases as income and corporate tax rates were lowered, he ignored me and continued with his questioning. What he failed to understand was that the question he was asking was not a valid question, when phrased as he insisted on asking it. A simple rephrasing of the question to “Why do you believe lowering the current tax rates is sound economic policy?” would have led to a healthy dialogue and the necessary exchange of ideas, which would have allowed him to make an educated decision about the quality of the candidate’s ideas. Sensing the need to provide inarguable data to make my point, I refused to acquiesce to economic ignorance in an attempt to cozy up to this individual, and started a conversation about the 2003 tax cuts under President George W. Bush. Predictably, he responded about the damaging effects on our national debt that these tax cuts had caused and doubled down on his assertion that tax cuts cost the government money by claiming that many economists disagree with me. When I questioned who these economists were he said, “Paul Krugman.” Krugman is a left-wing economist who, despite his Nobel Prize, has a number of deeply controversial left-wing beliefs about the role of monetary and fiscal policy in economic growth. I asked him if Krugman would argue the easily verifiable fact that the 2003 Bush tax cuts led to the largest four-year increase in government tax revenue in American history3 and even offered to forward him some data on the tax cuts. Again, he moved on as if I had never spoken the words.
