The NRA and LaPierre should not be let off the hook
by digby
The NRA is trying to blame Wayne LaPierre’s malevolent (and successful) political strategy on their ad agency. I’m sure the ad agency is terrible. But let’s be serious:
A new complaint in a lawsuit filed by the National Rifle Association against its former advertising agency, Ackerman McQueen, alleges that the firm engaged in “a stunning pattern of corruption, fraud, and retaliation” that nearly topped the organization’s CEO.
The complaint filing from October 25 first reported by the Daily Beast, also claims the gun rights organization’s infamous “culture war” publicity strategy was largely constructed by Ackerman McQueen — and that NRA executives found its work “distasteful and racist.”
In response, Ackerman McQueen argues — as its executive vice president Bill Powers did in an email to me — that the complaint is only an effort to hide the fact that the NRA is “self-destructing.” Ackerman McQueen accuses the NRA of committing fraud itself and of covering up a vast number of misdeeds, including allegations of sexual harassment.
In its counterclaim, the advertising firm states that — contrary to the claims of the NRA — the gun rights group and its CEO, Wayne LaPierre, were well aware of the messaging being used in its content. In fact, Ackerman McQueen alleges that LaPierre would ask for “more gasoline” and even riskier language in order to gain more notoriety for the group. In Ackerman McQueen’s telling, the NRA was well aware of the ad firm’s spending, with LaPierre’s “apparent paranoia and lust for secrecy” ensuring that he knew everything about the ad agency’s shaping of the NRA’s digital media outlet, NRATV.
The dueling complaints indicate one certainty: the relationship between the NRA and Ackerman McQueen, one that began in the early 1980s and made the NRA the most recognizable and powerful gun rights organization in America, is now one for the courts to adjudicate.
And the consequences for both sides could be dire. For Ackerman McQueen, allegations of fraud and double-billing could sink an 80-year legacy in advertising. But for the NRA, the lawsuit and the increasingly embarrassing allegations that court filings have revealed about the organization have already proven to be a dangerous distraction.
A finding against the NRA in court could put the group’s very existence at risk. If it were to lose the suit — and its tax-exempt status — it would be subject to not just the cost of losing the suit, but also the cost of annual income taxes (and back taxes as well.)
The NRA claims it was misled into wasting millions of dollars on a “dystopian culture rant”
As I’ve written previously, the NRA and Ackerman McQueen’s current enmity stems from alleged financial mismanagement that may have put the gun rights group in financial jeopardy.The souring stems from an NRA insurance program Ackerman McQueen helped to roll out that would cover legal fees for self-defense shootings. That program is under investigation by New York State authorities, and the costs of dealing with that probe have the gun rights organization increasingly concerned about its finances.
The NRA filed lawsuits against Ackerman McQueen, with one complaint alleging financial mismanagement, and another focused on NRATV. But the lawsuits have become a massive headache for the NRA and for the advertising firm, as allegations from both Ackerman and the NRA have led to former NRA president Oliver North stepping down from his post after just one year on the job amid allegations he attempted to blackmail NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and fueled accusations of outrageous spending on both sides.
Some of the spending on Ackerman McQueen’s part is fueled by revenue it has gained from the NRA — in fact, according to reporting by the New Yorker and the Trace, only 10 percent of the gun rights organization’s money is being spent on gun safety, training, and education, with the rest going to “messaging” efforts, like an Ackerman-produced magazine created to show off wealthy NRA members’ cars and planes.
The October 25th filing alleges that much of the money the NRA spent on Ackerman McQueen’s services was rendered under false pretenses. It claims Ackerman McQueen went to great lengths to defraud the NRA, most visibly through NRATV, the organization’s online streaming service that shut down earlier this year. The NRA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The filing contends that Ackerman McQueen inflated viewership numbers for the streaming service, fabricating and “misrepresenting” the service’s performance. And the NRA claims that in 13 in-person meetings with NRA leadership and “countless emails,” that the advertising agency lied to the NRA in order to get it to spend more money on a service Ackerman McQueen knew was “based on underlying, unvarnished, fulsome metrics that it intentionally withheld from the NRA … an abject failure.”
They take particular aim at Dana Loesche’s grotesque political videos which is nice. But please …
Monday, December 05, 2016
by digby
I wrote about the NRA for Salon this morning:
Sixteen years ago, when Al Gore won the popular vote but was denied the presidency due to the anachronism known as the Electoral College, Democrats tried to figure out how they could prevent such a weird anomalous result from happening again. As early as the day after the election, the New York Times was already laying the groundwork for what would become seen as the reason for Gore’s failure (although it would be many weeks before the result of that contested election became clear).
Vice President Gore had failed to spend enough time in his home state of Tennessee, it was said, opting instead to put resources into other tossup states like Michigan and Wisconsin. But the real reason he lost was a grand geographical shift:
While Tennessee has moved to the right in national politics, Mr. Gore has moved to the left since his days as a congressman, particularly on issues like abortion and gun control that have put him at odds with many Southern voters.
Two years later, when The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber addressed the question again, conventional wisdom was sealed. Scheiber reported that on the eve of the 2000 Democratic convention the Gore team had realized they had a big problem:
“The entire target of communication was Pennsylvania, western Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa. That’s the world Gore was trying to reach,” [pollster Stan] Greenberg recalls. Since these areas were chock-full of gun-toting union members, Team Gore decided that gun control would hurt the vice president in the states he needed most.
After the election, the Gore campaign’s hunch became Democratic gospel. Sure, Gore had won the Rust Belt battleground states, but the Democrats had lost their third straight bid to retake Congress — and many in the party believed gun control was to blame. In particular, they pointed to the election’s regional skew. In famously anti-gun California, the Dems knocked off three incumbents. But throughout the rest of the country, they defeated only one. “Of all the issues,” insists one senior Democratic congressman, gun control “had the greatest net [negative] effect.”
That “regional skew” is a real problem. By 2004 candidate John Kerry was running around in a hunting vest with a gun slung over his shoulder bragging about always eating what he killed. Not that it did him any good. The fact that he was against the sale of assault-style weapons was assumed to have been the kiss of death when those white rural voters rejected him.
The need to move away from “culture war” issues like gun control, abortion and marriage equality was considered gospel during that period in the Democratic wilderness. Then came the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina and a teetering economy that caught up to the Republicans, and Democrats won big in 2008.The assumption then was that Barack Obama had managed to put together a new Democratic coalition that was not dependent on those rural whites who feared the loss of their guns so much they would vote against anyone who favored common-sense gun safety regulation.
We saw Democrats find their voices on the issue after a horrific spate of mass killings, particularly the horrifying Newtown tragedy, in which classrooms full of tiny children were mowed down by a disturbed young man with a semi-automatic weapon. It became a defining cause of the party, with President Obama taking the lead in pushing the issue and elected Democrats holding an unprecedented sit-in on Capitol Hill last spring to protest GOP inaction on guns.
During the Bush years as well as the Obama years, the National Rifle Association was as active as ever. In 2000 when Bush finally prevailed, they were happy to help push the idea that his support for their cause was the defining issue of the election. The organization had bragged that it would be working out of President Bush’s office in the White House and NRA influence grew throughout his tenure as the group put money and organizing behind gun-friendly politicians at all levels of government.
But perversely or otherwise, the NRA actually experiences more growth when a Democrat is in the White House, and has become more powerful than ever during the Obama years. As the gun-tracking news organization called the Trace points out in this article, the NRA did this with a “populist” P.R. approach that perfectly dovetailed with Donald Trump’s anti-establishment campaign. One might even suggest that Trump stole a lot of his shtick from the NRA.
In 2008, the NRA’s visionary leader Wayne LaPierre declared war on establishment elites saying that they “believe the same elite conceit — you shouldn’t protect yourself. Government should. But we know there’s a little problem with that. They don’t give a damn about you!” The Trace reported:
Four years later, LaPierre expanded on the threats the elite posed to encompass free speech, religious liberty, even the ability of people to start small businesses or choose for themselves what kind of health care they want. Drug dealing illegal immigrants were being allowed to pour over the Southern border, he railed. Criminals in big cities were free to prey on innocents because judges were so lenient. “Not our issues, some might say.” He paused, and then countered: “Oh, but they are.”
In fact, the NRA has been pushing an anti-establishment message in one form or another since the mid-’90s. When Trump came along, LaPierre understood that unlike the patrician Mitt Romney, Trump’s sometime apostasy on guns would be outweighed by his ability to sell pitchfork-wielding populism and thinly-veiled calls for vigilantism. So the NRA went all in for Trump and spent millions on ads bashing Hillary Clinton in places like Columbus, Ohio; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Scranton, Pennsylvania. (I wrote about their first ad here.) According to the Center for Public Integrity, nearly one out of 20 TV ads in Pennsylvania was paid for by the NRA, and the group ran nearly 15,000 spots in the crucial swing states that Trump narrowly won, deciding the election.
LaPierre has released a new video, taking a victory lap in which he fatuously declares, “Our time is now. This is our historic moment to go on offense.” First on the agenda is demanding that the federal government enforce “concealed-carry reciprocity,” in which states would have to recognize permits to carry concealed weapons issued by other states, as if they were as benign as driver’s licenses. So much for federalism.
Most election postmortems have concluded that Democrats failed with non-college educated and rural white voters this time because of their economic message rather than guns or other culture-war issues. But perhaps that’s just the other side of the same coin. LaPierre and the NRA have a powerful understanding of what moves this constituency and they’ve been moving it in their direction for many years. The NRA has been selling anti-establishment Trumpism long before Trump came on to the scene. It’s Wayne LaPierre’s win as much as Donald Trump’s.
