Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

“But what about the lurkers?”

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Stand up, dammit!

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / R-Money’s Attack Dog

R-Money’s Attack Dog

by | 49 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,


__
In the New Yorker, the invaluable Jane Mayer explains how “the creator of the Willie Horton ad is going all out for Mitt Romney“:

Romney, unlike the remaining Republican candidates, has served no time in Washington. Yet he’s relying on a media offensive managed by operatives who have long been at the heart of Washington’s Republican attack machine. One of the leaders of this advertising war is Larry McCarthy, a veteran media consultant best known for creating the racially charged “Willie Horton ad,” which, in 1988, helped sink Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for President.
__
McCarthy, who is fifty-nine, helps direct the pro-Romney group Restore Our Future, one of the hundreds of new Super PACs—technically independent political-action committees set up by supporters of the candidates—that are dramatically reshaping the Presidential election. PACs have existed since the nineteen-forties, but for decades an individual donation was limited to five thousand dollars. The power of PACs increased exponentially in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals could spend without limit—and pool their money in PACs—to influence elections, as long as they didn’t fund candidates directly. Super PACs have already injected fifty-six million dollars into the 2012 race, most of it going to negative advertising. Restore Our Future has spent seventeen million dollars—more than any other PAC—and fifteen million of that has gone to producing and airing ads made by McCarthy’s firm, McCarthy Hennings Media. By contrast, Romney’s official campaign has spent only eleven million on ads. The Super PAC is technically fighting a proxy battle on behalf of Romney, but in practice it has become the head warrior…
__
“He doesn’t crave the limelight,” Cliff Shannon, the chief of staff for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, says. Shannon became office friends with McCarthy in the nineteen-seventies, when McCarthy was just out of Georgetown University, and they were both working as political aides for Senator John Heinz, of Pennsylvania. “You won’t find him on Fox morning news. He’s not in this for fame and fortune—though I’m sure he’s glad he’s made money. It’s about the work.”

And yet, this media ninja assassin is no humble cenobite:

According to one media consultant, the best in the business earn about four million dollars a year, which is more than most lobbyists and law partners make. Typically, seventy per cent of every political dollar raised in a Presidential campaign is spent on “media buys.” Campaign consultants don’t disclose their finances, but they typically charge clients seven per cent of a project’s media budget, in addition to taking consulting and production fees. Pollsters, by comparison, get only two per cent of the media budget, and campaign managers just one…
__
This year is likely to be McCarthy’s most profitable yet. It is predicted that total spending on television advertising in the Presidential race will reach two billion dollars. Both sides are well armed; though the Democrats trail the Republicans in Super PAC funds, Obama’s official campaign currently has twice as much money as Romney’s. Walter Shapiro recently argued in Washington Monthly that “the real crisis facing American politics” is not just the degradation of debate caused by such political air wars; it is “what elected officials have to do to raise the money to pay for those ads.” He concluded, “Gradually falling under the sway of big-time campaign donors is inevitable.”…

It’s well worth reading the entire article; McCarthy seems to have been associated with all the dirtest of the many dirty GOP campaigns during the past 25 years. Perhaps it’s for the best that Mayer’s article has been posted when the debate over President Obama ‘endorsing’ Super PAC donations is fresh; it includes the ominous sentence “Though both parties are outsourcing their dirty work to Super PACs this year, the main PAC supporting President Barack Obama, Priorities U.S.A. Action, has raised less than half the money collected by Restore Our Future.”

Reader Interactions

49Comments

  1. 1.

    freelancer

    This is the second photo and as such a different angle I’ve seen of the “R Money” T-shirt display debacle. Please tell me these are photoshopped, because I’d hate to send this shit out and have that thrown back in my face without the ability to retort with a source.

    If these are real, then it’s a certainty that there are GOP operatives out there that want to quarter the GOP operatives in the Romney camp for sucking ass at SCRABBLE&#0153.

  3. 3.

    Jewish Steel

    Annie, I do remember you predicting months ago that once the wider American public got a look at Romney, not just political junkies, they would quickly sour on him. How right you appear to have been. Credit where it is due.

  6. 6.

    freelancer

    @Jewish Steel:

    Yup, that’s where I saw it in a different angle and context. I assumed that the Romney camp would have immediately ix-nayed the T shirt idea or any variation of spelling out his goddamned name so as to not have this monumental PR image fuckup happen twice. GOP voters are fucking stupid, it’s the political operatives that bear all the teeth, and I thought the first instance was liberal photoshopping. No more. The R Money camp is THAT fucking stupid. Team Fuck Yeah, take note.

  7. 7.

    a.j.

    Is the Washington Monthly website hacked or something tonight?

    Kept redirecting me somewhere weird, maybe don’t go there if you think your anti-virus etc may not be 100% up to date.

    Damn strange.

  8. 8.

    R-Jud

    Favorite comment from the Gawker peanut gallery: “Not even magic underwear can hold back the surge of Santorum!”

  10. 10.

    Kristine

    @a.j.: Chrome sent me to a safe page and advised me not to visit. I’ve got a Mac, but decided safety the better part of online valor and stayed away. Wonder what happened

  12. 12.

    Barney

    @freelancer:
    Probably the same event – the picture the flag background appeared on the same day at Democratic Underground. It’s just a difference of curtains or flag for the background, and you’d quite likely have the curtains on a stage drawn at some points. I think the one with Romney in works better, just because it ties him to it, rather than it possibly being a stunt by someone else, but, yes, both are photoshops.

  14. 14.

    WereBear

    It worked out beautifully that the Republicans got a hard fought primary so that Citizens United blew up in their faces rather than ours. I swear, I’ve had turtles that exhibited more ability to figure out cause and effect, and I have cats who do it better!

  15. 15.

    amk

    For all that gazillions of pac money and disgusting attack ads,

    1. r-money has

    won only 73 counties from among the 412 to have reported results in the Republican nomination race so far, giving him an 18 percent success rate.

    2. the googled guy has now won more states than r-money has and spent 30 million less doing it.

    3. rethug voter turn-out is dismally lower than that of 2008

    4. r-money could not breach the 50% mark thus far (though through, NV gooper shenanigans, they did their best to get him to 50% but even they could not take him over the line). Even the frothy lube guy breached that today fergodsake.

    5. r-money’s vote count so far is pathetically low when compared to 2008.

    So what exactly have all those super-pacs and their stupid donors have achieved so far ?

  16. 16.

    WyldPirate

    @Raven:

    OMG! The President of the United States let a kid shoot a marshmallow out of an air cannon in the White House!

    Just saw that on “Way too Early”, Raven. Cool as hell he let the kid do that.

  20. 20.

    WyldPirate

    @Raven:

    Mornin Joe is just thrilled that the culture wars are firing up.

    What the fuck is wrong with Scarblow–other than being fucking stupid–for blaming Obama for Prop 8’s being overturned? And why in they hell can’t dumb motherfuckers like Scarblow and Halperin not figure out that the goddamned choice to violate religious tenets WRT to contraception is on the backs of the beneficiaries and not the provider?

  21. 21.

    Egg Berry

    @WyldPirate:

    And why in they hell can’t dumb motherfuckers like Scarblow and Halperin not figure out

    I think the answer is right there in your question. They’re not paid to be bright.

    Edit: As to the photo, I am always sort of sickened by those types of pictures of children being dragged up on stage. Are those his kids? Do they really have a stance on the GOP field? Keep them out of your propaganda. I know, pissing in the wind, I am.

  22. 22.

    Warren Terra

    It really is cute the way Rmoney brags about not having served in Washington – FSM knows he tried. It’s like Newt bragging about only serving two terms as Speaker, or Santorum bragging about only serving two terms in the Senate.

    PS as said above a few times it is a photoshopped image; there’s a whole bunch of slightly different versions of the un-shopped pic for the smart-alecs to play with. More importantly, it’s a very funny photoshopped image, especially the version with Rmoney himself grinning and draping himself over them.

  27. 27.

    WyldPirate

    I can’t believe the stupidity of our media. They are sitting there on Morning Blow right now yakking about Romney under performing compared to 2008. That’s not the story.

    The real story is that the Rethugs candidates are so sorry that no one is showing up to vote. They couldn’t get 100k to turn out in Colorado TOTAL.

  29. 29.

    mick

    why i read doghouse riley:

    Strange as it may seem, thirty years of insisting that our problems weren’t real has somehow have failed to solve them. So that in the first and possibly only quarter of the 21st century, USAmerica has a wrecked economy, a much bigger oil habit, the finest, most competent, and best equipped military machine ever to be thwarted by a nation of goatherders, and has pretty much finished shipping all its manufacturing jobs to Asia while putting everyone who used to fill those jobs in prison. And we achieved all this by the simple expedient of believing that the more you cut taxes the more revenue you raised, and that anything Liberals believed was designed to cut America to Her knees.

  30. 30.

    Egg Berry

    @WyldPirate: I wouldn’t say I would be surprised either, but that story is such thinly sourced melodrama and indicative of how much TPM has become the Gawker of the beltway.

  31. 31.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @WyldPirate: At least, the piece was written to look that way. OTOH, even the unnamed “group of women’s reproductive health advocates” that didn’t sound worried. When your anonymous source won’t even give good controversy, you don’t have much in your story.

  32. 32.

    bob h

    Given the Santorum wins last night, just what has this messaging genius accomplished for Romney?

  35. 35.

    JPL

    @Raven: Brian Williams and Dianne Sawyer covered the event on the news last night. One said the marshmallow flew over the head of secret service.

  38. 38.

    amk

    @LOLGOP tweet

    The only way Mitt Romney could be more hated by the Tea Party is if his dad were born in Kenya.

  40. 40.

    WyldPirate

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I wasn’t going as much on the TPM article as the AP link in it and the weasel-words being mouthed by Jay Carney and Axlerod on my teevee.

    To me, I think the administration made its concessions–and the right one–by protecting the churches that employ folks on faith-based criteria like clergy. When faith isn’t a prerequisite for employment–like at hospitals and universities—the churches shouldn’t let their faith dictate provision of health care options and this is particularly true if they accept federal funding.

  41. 41.

    Brandon

    It’s well worth reading the entire article

    I firmly disagree. It was pretty full on formulaic Villager dross, patent pending.

    It took but four paragraphs for her to unironically reference Politifact. She then returns to that well later on to cite the Washington Post fact checker. She hit a Villager double with that citation because she used it for her obligatory balance.

    This is hardly to say that the Democrats have clean hands.

    I mean seriously, how lazy can you get? And that is basically where I stopped. Actually I stopped just a few paragraphs later as she desperately tried to humanize the demagoguer by citing all his great bi=partisan Villager friendships. I can only imagine that she “interviewed” them at a youth soccer game.

    But the point where I really stopped is where she described his home and lifestyle as “humble”. Considering that she said he lived in Bethesda, one of the most affluent suburbs in America, I called b.s. and did a little investigating. Turns out, his “humble” white colonial sits on a humble half acre of land and appraises for over $1m. Not that humble if you ask me, but she’s bonafide o.g. Villager, so her bubble has obviously warped her sensibilities. But I figured that the real reason she believes that McCarthy lives “humbly” is because her lifestyle is apparently more lavish, as her home also appraises over $1m and a full $100k more that McCarthy’s.

    How do I know that Jane Mayer is o.g. Villager? Well I had never really considered her before about anything, but I decided to check out her bio to understand why on earth the New Yorker would pay her real money to write for them. First of all, she has probably the most pure Villager pedigree that exists, as she has Ivy credentials from Yale, worked as a reporter for the Washington Star, went on to marry this bell end. That’s right, he had a 29-year career at the Washington Post before jumping ship to venerable Politico. But even more interesting though, her bio also says that she has a daughter named ‘Kate’, which I can only assume she apparently named after the Village patron saint.

    I am sorry Annie, but this article is just utter garbage and says much more about the author than it does the subject. It actually saddens me that you are recommending this to others to read.

  42. 42.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @WyldPirate: Weasel words are used to avoid a fight. In this case, I think the WH is using them to placate the churches. Fundamentally, I tended to agree with you on where the line should be drawn. If the church is hiring for churchy things, religion matters. If the church is hiring for other things, it does not. Also, on insurance, churches should be able to tell their adherents not to use the contraceptive coverage without denying it to anyone. Insurance coverage is bundled like cable channels. I don’t watch Fox News, but my cable company still makes it available.

  43. 43.

    harlana

    a commenter linked to this pic a few days ago in a comments thread – don’t remember who, anyway, give a h/t to him/her if possible! :)

  46. 46.

    WyldPirate

    @Anya:

    I hope Jezebel is right. I would hate to see women get thrown under the bus—yet again– to appease the believers of the Invisible Cloud-riding Sky Daddy.

  47. 47.

    grandpa john

    @WyldPirate: True, but to talk about that part of the story doesn’t keep the “horse race” aspect going , which is the main agenda for the media

  48. 48.

    FuriousPhil

    Even now that I know it’s shopped, that photo made me chuckle.

    I’m imagining some sort of terrible out-of-touch deliberate rap video cooked up by the Mittens campaign to court the ‘hip young conservatives.’

    His name’s R-Money, got cash in the Caymans
    Got his own golden plates, gifts from the Mormons
    All the liberal spenders better take cover – beware!
    My man R-Money’s got bulletproof magic underwear!

Comments are closed.