The Noose Around The Hydra

Franklin Foer has written an absolutely must-read article this week in The New Republic (which, unfortunately, is subscription only.) He writes about the College Republicans, who are key to understanding the modern Republican party. I know that sounds absurd, but it is absolutely true. His thesis is that the operatives of the GOP learn to fight the Democrats by fighting with each other.

Before the election of new leadership this year, the College Republicans, fresh faced little gangsters that they are, had already been accused of corrupt fundraising by bilking little old ladies out of large sums of money. As with all College Republican elections, this one was distinguished by dirty tricks, betrayal and strong arm tactics:

Everyone who watched this summer’s race for College Republican National Committee (crnc) chair with any detachment has a favorite moment of chutzpah they admire in spite of themselves. Leading the count are the following: speaking sotto voce of your opponent’s “homosexuality”; rigging the delegate count so that states that support your candidate have twice as many votes as those that don’t; and using a sitting congressman to threaten the careers of undecided voters. I can understand the perverse appeal of each of these incidents. But I cast my vote for the forged letter.

He goes on to describe a beautiful little piece of ratfucking that will stand the victor in good stead when he’s called upon to destroy political opponents in the future. And there is much more. But the thing that is most interesting about this is that he points out what very few people seem to realize — that this is not just a bunch of kooky co-eds having fun. It is officially sanctioned and run by the Republican establishment. After all, it was the training ground for the entire political apparatus of the modern GOP — including a bunch of names we’ve seen a lot of recently in association with words like “arrest,” “indictment” and “federal investigation.” And there’s money involved, of course.

Behind the scenes, in the campaign war rooms, small armies of veteran Republican operatives and congressional staffers toil. That’s because there’s much more at stake in the elections than a swish post-college gig. After campaign finance reform, the College Republicans reinvented themselves as a big-time 527–a group legally allowed to spend an infinite amount of its own money on campaigns–with a budget of over $17 million. They have a massive network of operatives to send into the field to bolster candidates, and they have patronage to spread among friends and through direct-mail firms. In other words, it’s well worth tearing a Shermanesque path to the sea to control College Republicans, no matter the carnage–and no matter the expense. Michael Davidson said he spent an estimated $200,000–raised off high-rollers who normally sign checks to senators and presidential wannabes–trying to claim the grand prize.

But the significance of the crnc goes beyond that. The Committee is the place where Republican strategists learn their craft and acquire their knack for making their Democratic opponents look like disorganized children. Many of the biggest-brand Republican operatives–from Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, to Charlie Black and Roger Stone, to Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist–got their starts this way. Walking through the halls of the convention, it is easy to see the genesis of tactics deployed in the Florida recount and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Republicans learn how to fight hard against Democrats by practicing on one another first. “There are no rules in a knife fight,” Norquist instructed the young conventioneers in a speech. And, while Norquist described a knife fight, the Gourley-Davidson rumble transpired around him.

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… Gourley received the blessing of the outgoing chairman, Eric Hoplin. But, in reality, he had won the blessing of a force more powerful than a single politician. He had won the blessing of an entity that College Republicans speak of in hushed tones and that they compare to the Empire in Star Wars–the Establishment.

When College Republicans invoke the Establishment, they mean a clique of former College Republicans–now grown-ups playing politics at the highest level–who will trample anyone to maintain their clique’s control of the organization. Like all good cabals, it is hard to know exactly who belongs to the Establishment and how Machiavellian their meddling is. Before his tumble from grace, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff would lend College Republicans his skybox at the MCI center, donate money, and lead training sessions. (In 2002, the crnc paid Jack Abramoff for “accounting & legal services.”) Rove reportedly keeps tabs, and Norquist invites the group’s chair to attend his celebrated Wednesday gathering of conservative big shots. But the convention offered some more suggestive examples of the Establishment’s methodology. Just past 2 a.m. on Saturday, wavering delegates from Louisiana received calls from Morton Blackwell, the legendary veteran of the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns, urging them to vote for Gourley. It was a perfectly calibrated tactic. “A 19-year-old Republican will generally do whatever a demigod of the conservative movement like Morton tells them,” one Davidson supporter griped.

And they are even more likely to respond to entreaties from a congressman. Patrick McHenry, a dough-faced 29-year-old freshman representative from North Carolina and former crnc treasurer, went to war on Gourley’s behalf. “I got a call. They said, ‘The congressman is on the line,'” University of North Carolina junior Jordan Selleck told me. “He basically said that we’d be screwed if we didn’t switch to Gourley. Our careers in politics would be over.” As Jennifer Holder, who served as a state chair in the ’90s, lamented, “There are a lot of sharks infesting the kiddie pool.”

Does everyone remember how Bush was extolled as the guy who would bring honor and integrity back to the White House? How the grown-ups were in charge? These are his people:

Back in 1981, Abramoff and his campaign manager, Norquist, promised their leading competitor, Amy Moritz, the job of crnc executive director if she dropped out of the race. Moritz took the bait, but it turned out that Abramoff had made the promise with his fingers crossed. Norquist took the executive director job and named Moritz his deputy. That demotion didn’t last long, either. After discovering the talented Ralph Reed, Norquist handed the Christian Coalition godfather Moritz’s responsibilities and her office space. They placed all of Moritz’s belongings in a box labeled amy’s desk. Even 25 years later, she hasn’t shed her role as College Republican doormat. Abramoff used her think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, to funnel nearly $1 million into a phony direct-mail firm with an address identical to his own.

While College Republicans have a vague understanding of Abramoff’s ascent, they all can recite the ballad of Rove and Atwater–the ultimate object lesson in how the Establishment strikes back. In 1973, Rove was the Establishment candidate, and Atwater, the original Sun Tsu-quoting College Republican, was his prime campaign operative. They spent the spring of 1973 crisscrossing the country in a Ford Pinto, lining up the support of state chairs–basically the right-wing version of Thelma and Louise. But, in point of fact, Rove was hardly the right-winger in the race. His two opponents, Terry Dolan and Robert Edgeworth, were. And, when Dolan threw his support to Edgeworth, Rove had no other alternative. He had to cheat.

When the College Republicans gathered for their convention at the Lake of the Ozarks resort in Missouri, Rove and Atwater relentlessly challenged the legitimacy of Edgeworth’s delegates, even if the evidence did not justify their attacks. Because of Rove’s allegations, the convention ended in deadlock. In revenge, Dolan went to The Washington Post with recordings that captured training seminars where Rove boasted of his campaign techniques, including rooting through opponents’ garbage cans and other forms of campaign espionage. The Post broke the story under the headline “gop probes official as teacher of tricks.” The Republican National Committee chairman, one George H.W. Bush, however, didn’t punish Rove for his less-than-high-minded behavior. Instead, he gave Rove the chairmanship and sent Edgeworth a scathing letter accusing him of disloyalty. “He wrote me out of the party,” Edgeworth told James Moore and Wayne Slater, the authors of the biography Bush’s Brain.

(Where do you suppose anyone would get the idea that Karl Rove might be the type of person to purposefully out a CIA agent for political purposes?)

These tactics have worked well since the Nixon administration and those who use them are responsible for building the most powerful and successful political machine in the modern era. Way back when, in the glory days when Abramoff, Norquist and Reed ran the college Republicans, Norquist is quoted as saying:

[Stalin] was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got an ice ax through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.

Brownie was no accident; the placing of hacks in positions of responsibility is not just ad hoc political payback. The cronyism is by design.

Needless to say, none of these people had a clue — or any interest — in actual governance. They are political hit men. But they control the party apparatus and when they finally achieved what they had been dreaming of for many years, they got greedy.

I wrote the other day about the idea that the only thing that can stop these people is the legal system. This is because the press and politics are too easily manipulated by entertainment values, spin and confusion right now. It’s a lot harder to bullshit someone who has the power to subpoena your records and arrest you for lying. Federal prosecutors squeeze anyone and everyone they can to get someone to flip on big fishes. And there are a lot of little fishes now. And medium sized fishes too.

Every one of these former college Republicans (the Establishment) are now in the cross hairs of the legal system. Norquist hasn’t been officially named, but his affiliations with all the people who are coming under legal scrutiny are so close that it’s just a matter of time. Safavian, especially, is an interesting connection because he also feeds into a nervousness among the fervent neocons about Grover’s unseemly closeness to Muslims:

Norquist has for some years now been promoting Islamist organizations, including even the Council on American-Islamic Relations; for example, he spoke at CAIR’s conference, “A Better America in a Better World” on October 5, 2004. Frank Gaffney has researched Norquist’s ties to Islamists in his exhaustive, careful, and convincing study, “Agent of Influence” and concludes that Norquist is enabling “a political influence operation to advance the causes of radical Islamists, and targeted most particularly at the Bush Administration.”

But if Norquist is indeed a convert to Islam, it could be that he is not just enabling the Islamist causes but is himself an Islamist. (April 14, 2005)

That’s Daniel Pipes, neocon prince. Norquist marrying a Palestinian American woman sent him into an absolute tizzy. But Norquist has been involved with the Muslim community for some time — for purely political reasons, in my opinion. Norquist’s cause and religion is Republicanism. He was just doing what he does — building the coalition. They’ve been courting Christians for decades and he thought he could court Muslims too — except he apparently couldn’t finesse the neocon fixation with Israel or the violent fixation of Osama bin Laden. The man is not a miracle worker after all.

Safavian is an Iranian American from Detroit, the home of the biggest Islamic population in the US. He’s a political hack in the Norquist/Abramoff posse. Still, it is more than amusing that Norquist’s ties to the Islamic community have been so well tolerated by all the right wing gasbags who have been one handedly typing the word “islamofascist!” for the past four years — amusing but not surprising. After all, nobody but a few cranks at Horowitz’s operation cared that Norquist and his pal Dana Rohrabacker were hanging out with the Taliban right up until 9/11.

But Norquist and Safavian (and Abramoff, the allegedly pious Jew) were involved with some unsavory characters that this scandal is going to bring to the surface. Grover may be in the kind of trouble his big brother Rove is in — national security style trouble. At the very least, his effectiveness is going to be curtailed as these investigations circle around him. Money people get nervous at times like this.

I have long agreed with the old saying that if you want to kill the snake you’ve gotta go for the head. In the case of the modern Republican Party, it’s a four headed hydra consisting of Karl Rove (strategy), Tom DeLay (party enforcer), Ralph Reed (christian right) and Grover Norquist (movement organizer.) They all interact with one another at the nexus of K Street and the RNC. They may be taken down by one guy — their good friend, ex uber-lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. (Uncle Karl, of course, is likely in even deeper shit.)

The Democrats have never exploited (or never been able to exploit) the sheer criminality of this gang. They all learned the ratfucking business while still little sprouts in the College Republican organization. According toe Rick Perlstein’s fine book about the Goldwater campaign “Before The Storm,” as early as 1964, college student Morton Blackwell — who later named the “Moral Majority” and ran Jeff Gannon Guckert’s alma mater, the (GOP) Leadership Institute — was sabotaging the competition at the GOP convention. They’ve been at this a long, long time.

Back in May, I wrote:

These are [Nixon’s] political heirs, raised and nurtured on the mother’s milk of corruption and dishonesty; scarred while very young by the ignominious downfall of their political father; driven to wreak revenge and recapture what they perceived as their rightful ownership of American politics. They are the spawn of Watergate resentment and this country will never be healthy until this group of radicals are removed from positions of power.

Watch this Abramoff scandal. It may go nowhere, but the potential for a lethal, if not mortal, wound to the conservative movement resides inside it.

The baby bad guys were on display at the College republican election — and the baddest baby bad guy won. But the article shows that the win was really accomplished with the collusion of the anointed bad boy with the professional operatives. If they go down this chain may be broken.

As I said, I don’t think that normal political processes will be able to deal with this gang of crooks. But it looks like greed and hubris may have pushed them into the sights of the justice system. There are no guarantees, of course, but it’s just possible that with this particular mob of political criminals under the gun — and some of them out of the picture — the Nixon era may finally come to a close.

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