Did Murkowski “Make History”? Or Did DC Republicans Fix the Game for Corruption?
Within hours of Lisa Murkowski’s concession speech the evening of August 31, 2010, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had issued a Press Release congratulating Joe and pledging their “strong support.” Senator John Cornyn, the titular head of the Committee, was quoted as saying “the NRSC is committed to doing everything that we can to ensure Joe Miller’s victory in November.” Undoubtedly, the intent was to reassure Republican donors that everything was as it should be.
I’m not sure why we were so eager to take them at their word, but in retrospect, it was a lot like one of those “we’re here from the government, and we’re here to help” moments. The very people who, just days earlier, had ostensibly sent operatives up in support of our opponent’s attempt to steal an election were now in our corner?
But times were tough. In the run-up to the primary we had spent everything we had, and then some. Desperate times call for desperate measures. And the NRSC was promising to deliver on nearly $1 million to ensure Joe’s success, a sum that goes a long way in a small media market like Alaska. After all, we had won the four month primary with just $300K., one-third of which was a loan from the candidate.
Within days, a senior operative from the NRSC was on the ground in Alaska. I remember the day Terry Nelson arrived at campaign headquarters. After a brief introduction, our new campaign manager, who had only been in Anchorage for a matter of days, kicked me out of my office in order to have a private place to meet with Nelson. They spent the rest of the day, and part of the next, ostensibly hammering out details of how this whole thing was going to go down. I found it incredibly odd that someone who had been there for the whole campaign and intimately involved with a winning strategy in the primary would just be summarily dismissed from involvement in planning the strategy for the general election. In retrospect, I should have refused to leave the room. I know Joe would have backed me up.
In time, campaign staff would also meet with Alaska Republican Party officials. They were not so savvy. State Party Chair Randy Ruedrich didn’t even try to hide his contempt. We listened as he told us all the ways the ARP could “help.” Somehow I wasn’t buying his sudden conversion and his professions of sincerity. It might have had something to do with the fact that he used the meeting as a platform to launch into a diatribe about how Joe Miller had lied to a party apparatchik. When he revealed his evidence for the charge, it was based on a second or third-hand piece of gossip from some yenta in the Capitol City Republican Women’s group. She alleged that Joe Miller had supposedly misled her on his intentions to run for US Senate back in April at the State Convention. (When I followed up with Joe on the matter, I discovered that she had asked him whether he would declare his intentions at the Republican State Convention. He answered that he would not, and he didn’t. Period. Joe’s story was later corroborated by former Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Rhonda Boyles who overheard the conversation.)
Our meeting with the ARP was such a smashing success that a clearly embarrassed Casey Reynolds, the Party spokesman, suggested that we meet again over lunch without the State Chairman present. We obliged. However, that meeting ended in similar fashion when Casey took umbrage at my suggestion that the Party was making no attempt to require anything of Murkowski. Everything was on us. He had essentially instructed us to grovel before the defeated Murkowski and meet all of her demands. I reminded him that we had won and it was her responsibility to bring her folks back into the fold. But having said that, we would be happy to meet her half way. Joe had spoken with both Senator Murkowski upon her concession, and her Senate Chief of Staff Karen Knutson, asking both for Murkowski’s phone number so he could follow up. They both refused his requests. I later placed a call in to Murkowski spokesman Steve Wackowski in an attempt to smooth things over. He was cordial, but there was no reciprocity. The Murkowski campaign had closed all lines of communication and the Party was apparently unwilling to solicit their cooperation.
Meanwhile, Joe was planning a trip to Washington DC to meet with Republican leaders and attend some fundraisers on the ground there. I got bumped from the trip by a new staffer who had significant DC experience. Michael Pauley went in my place. I agreed to it, but it would have been a little more palatable if I had been asked before my spot was given away, instead of after the fact. What was I supposed to say? Not wanting to make a scene, I told Robert Campbell that it was ok and put it behind me. Michael was a good addition to the team, and by all accounts proved a valuable asset in the Capitol.
However, it was foolhardy to have other staff on the ground in Washington with zero political experience. There was apparently a high level of credulity and a willingness to accommodate anything the Washington insiders wanted. And in the end, we got played big time!
When the Millers arrived in Washington, they were greeted by a couple junior Senate staffers who were assigned to show them around. Apparently, they were not being taken seriously by Senate leadership. But after a couple of packed-out fundraisers, senior Senators began to take notice and decided it might be a good idea to get to know this guy.
At one meeting with several Republican Senators present, Joe was asked what he thought the proper course of action was on budget issues if the Republicans failed to win a majority in the Senate. He answered that, given our current fiscal situation, making significant cuts was not something he was willing to negotiate over. The Republicans would have to shut down the government, if necessary, to make it happen.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was livid and let Joe know in no uncertain terms that he would cease and desist on any talk of shutting down the government. Joe Miller, not one to be easily cowed, was having none of it. Little did he know to what lengths the Establishment would go in order to make sure it didn’t happen. In time, it would become abundantly clear that Republican leadership did not want statesmen in the United States Senate. They wanted people they could control, which is exactly why they so detested folks like Senator Jim DeMint.
As far as we know, Jim DeMint was the only member of the Senate Republican Conference to speak out against Senator Murkowski retaining her Committee assignments after she thumbed her nose at the Party and declared as a write-in candidate against the Party’s nominee. The Senate Republican Conference’s inaction in this regard was shameful, and disastrous to our prospects. In fact, the failure of the Senate Republican Conference to strip Murkowski of leadership is the primary reason that powerful special interests, such as native corporations, unions, and federal contractors, committed millions toward her write-in effort. If Murkowski had been stripped of Senate leadership, what could she offer her cronies? It is not an understatement to say that the Senate Republican Conference’s decision was the most damaging action taken against us in the general election, and that is a mouthful.
Senator DeMint’s frustration came through loud and clear, “It was bad enough to watch my colleagues work to support her in the primary after she had built a record of betraying conservatives’ principles,” he said. “But watching them back her after she left the party and launched a campaign against the Republican nominee was more than I could bear.”
What I found even more astounding was Senator Murkowski’s response when she was asked by a correspondent from TIME magazine if her colleagues had surprised her. She said, “I’m not surprised. This was an affirmation of the relationship that I’ve built over the past eight years with the people that I work with. I think they recognize ‘she’s got a real shot at coming back here, and it only makes good sense that we would not want to be so punitive that she would be discouraged by the actions of her colleagues.’” Senator Orrin Hatch seemed to confirm Murkowski’s sentiments when he was quoted in The Christian Science Monitor rationalizing the decision. “She’s still a senator until the end of this year and, regardless, she’s our friend,” he said.
Let me get this straight. She already knew what was coming? And her colleagues didn’t want to discourage her write-in bid? And they were going to make decisions based upon membership in the Incumbent Club? That is exactly the opposite of what most were saying publicly. But their actions were confirming Murkowski’s words. Whether they realize it or not, the Senate Republicans’ unwillingness to exercise Party discipline has contributed to an atmosphere that constitutes an existential threat to the future viability of the Republican Party itself. The fragile center-right coalition that has served the Party so well for so many years is fraying at the edges. Conservatives no longer trust moderates, and for good reason. When moderates lose, they abandon the Party. Conservatives have held their nose for years and voted for what they considered to be the lesser of two evils. There is no longer any reason to do so when it is assured that the center will not keep faith with the right when the ball doesn’t bounce their way.
The truth is, Senate Republicans could have ended Murkowski’s candidacy on the spot had they wished to do so. Seniority was her only calling card; she had nothing else to offer Alaska. Jim DeMint knew it, and he also knew the consequences of his colleagues’ decision. DeMint was quoted in a Politico article the next day saying, “One senator after another stood up in favor of protecting her place on the committee – a position she will no doubt use in her campaign against Joe Miller, the conservative Republican nominee.” And use it she did. While the Party leadership continued to pay lip service to Miller, their actions betrayed them. In reality, Senate Republicans chose not stand by the Party nominee, siding instead with the turncoat Murkowski. In his book The Great American Awakening, Senator Jim DeMint called their actions an implicit endorsement, stating that “It was not a question of electibility; with Republican support he would easily win the election. But Murkowski divided Republican support for our nominee and undermined the primary system established to give Republican voters the right to choose their candidates.”
However, the implicit endorsement of the Senate Republican Conference was only the beginning of the Washington establishment’s efforts to subvert Joe Miller’s candidacy. In spite of the fact that internal polling showed Murkowski to be our primary threat, according to FEC records the NRSC spent more than quarter-million dollars in independent expenditures attacking Scott McAdams, and none attacking Lisa Murkowski. In addition, I believe that much of the more than three hundred thousand dollars reported as being spent in support of Joe Miller was also expended in opposition to Scott McAdams. In essence, they were running ads attacking McAdams with a tag line at the end telling voters to support Joe, and then reporting them to the FEC as ads run in support of Miller. Politico seemed to echo my sentiments in an article published before the final FEC disclosures even came out, indicating that they had inside information. That would mean it was more like a half-million dollar hit on McAdams, almost all spent in the last two weeks of the campaign. It is absurd to suggest that associating Joe Miller with the attacks offered him support. Chances of picking up votes from McAdams were remote in the extreme anyway, but the fact that Joe was associated with negative ads targeting a “nice guy” like Scott would have been insufferable for potential McAdams voters and ensured that Joe wouldn’t get their vote. He was a liberal Democrat whose voters were simply not going to vote for someone he was calling an “extremist” anyway.
It should be patently obvious to anyone with even a modicum of political acumen that the NRSC’s independent expenditure campaign was designed to help Lisa Murkowski. The most favorable poll we had on McAdams had him trailing Murkowski by more than thirteen points with two weeks to go. The poll also had McAdams ahead of Joe which, by the pollster’s own admission, wasn’t true. The poll was intentionally skewed. More than 60% of the respondents self-identified as either liberal or moderate, a sample not even approximating the electorate in Alaska. I suspect it was engineered that way so the NRSC could justify their behavior. But it really only made their actions that much more outrageous, because it indicated that Murkowski was likely even farther ahead of McAdams than the poll reflected, which was indeed the case on election day. I can only conclude that our “friends” in Washington never intended to help us defeat Murkowski. They had their own agenda, and it didn’t include Joe Miller.
I remember the day I handed over Joe Miller’s logos and electronic signature to the NRSC’s point man, Robert Simms, so he could use them for fund-raising. Apparently the committee used Joe’s good name and signature to raise the very money they would deploy to defeat him. I don’t know if they did anything illegal, but it stinks to high heaven. Where I come from in fly-over country, they call that fraud.
By the time the campaign was winding down, there had been a lot of speculation about what the NRSC’s designs were for weeks. We could never quite understand why every decision they made seemed so counter-intuitive, or why they insisted that we not defend Joe from the relentless incoming attacks. Nor did it ever make any sense that we were being held back from highlighting Murkowski’s duplicity and outright lies about Joe Miller. Further, the strategy employed by Simms to pitch the whole direct mail campaign to the middle and target “soft Republicans” made no sense. I knew from the start that if they really wanted to help Joe win, they were on a fool’s errand with that strategy, and I told them so. All they were going to do was tick Murkowski supporters off and get them out to the polls. As it turned out, I missed the point anyway. They had no intention of helping Joe Miller.
Though I had had my suspicions, it all came into focus about two weeks before Election Day when I received a phone call from Alaska Republican Party Chair Randy Ruedrich. He had the skinny on Scott McAdams he said, replete with several very damaging pieces of information. He recited them for me and said he would send me the file attachment via email and call back later to work with me on a way to break the news. I never let on to him that I was anything but supportive of the idea, but as soon as we hung up I walked across the hall to Rob Simms’ office. I told Rob that I didn’t think we should be attacking Scott. It wasn’t in our best interest. I asked him what he thought of the situation. He concurred; we should not be attacking Scott McAdams. But he added that the folks from National had probably already put the dirt out there. As it turned out, they hadn’t, but that extra bit of information made it clear who was behind the effort. And the fact that Randy Ruedrich never sent the information to me, didn’t call back like he said he would, and never mentioned word one about the scenario again made it abundantly clear that he and Simms were collaberating. Simms had evidently calculated that given the fact that I was the only person on the campaign who seemed worried about having a McAdams ad in the hopper in case we needed it in the waning days, and that I was a strong advocate of using our TV and radio ads to hit Murkowski where it hurt, that I would approve of vicious personal attacks on Scott McAdams. He was wrong on both counts.
Imagine my astonishment a few hours later when I jumped in my car and headed across town, only to hear not one, but two NRSC ads attacking Scott McAdams within the span of about ten minutes. I immediately headed back to headquarters, marched straight in to Rob Simms’ office and grilled him about what the NRSC was up to. His response? He lied to me, saying that Scott McAdams was now ahead. When I responded with incredulity, he assured me that there was new polling out showing McAdams to be in the lead. I recounted to him the poll results I had reviewed and let him know I wasn’t buying it. After a few minutes of questioning, Simms conceded that McAdams was, in fact, not ahead, but claimed he was surging. I asked to see evidence and was told that was not possible because Joe Miller had not paid for the poll. I returned a few minutes later to ask Simms if I could see his mythical poll if Joe paid for it. He replied, “Theoretically. We could probably do that.” I knew at that point that the guy was not squaring with me. I should have kicked his sorry butt out of the office on the spot. In fact, it should have been done the day Senate Republicans voted to allow Murkowski to retain her committee assignments. Besides, Simms had been like a cancer eating away at the inside of the campaign for weeks.
In retrospect, it appears that the whole point of the scheme was to cover for the NRSC’s independent expenditure campaign that would commence within hours. How else could one account for Ruedrich’s urgent phone call that morning? The whole affair leaves one with a strong suspicion that there was illegal coordination between the NRSC’s supposed coordinated expenditures and their independent expenditure campaign.
In the waning days of the campaign, Rob Simms would repeatedly defend the media’s attacks on Joe, and in the final week leading up to election day praised Lisa Murkowski’s rash of direct mail attacks as “good politics.” He told me she was “just delivering the knockout punch.” Then he added, “I would do the same thing.” That is when I confronted him in front of several other staffers. I asked, if it was such good politics and he would do the same thing, why he had obstructed us from attacking Murkowski for weeks, and refused to allow us to defend Joe’s honor. Whatever he had to say for himself, the buck stopped with him. He controlled almost all of the messaging for the direct mail campaign, radio, and television. He had the final say on our interactions with the media. He had been given a blank check. Why was he playing the role of pacifist in the middle of a firefight?
In the final week of the election, ABC news picked up on what was going on in Alaska. Jon Karl had sniffed this thing out. As far as I know, he wasn’t even on the ground here, and he knew it didn’t smell right. He wrote, “If the NRSC really wanted to help Miller, it would be attacking Murkowski. Indeed, an anti-McAdams ad may be the last thing Miller needs right now. At this point, what he really needs is for McAdams to siphon anti-Miller votes away from Murkowski.”
On the Sunday before the election, on THIS WEEK with Christiane Amanpour, the question was put to Senator Cornyn whether the Party had given up on Joe Miller, and whether the Senator thought he could win. Cornyn again paid lip service to the NRSC’s support for the Republican nominee, but added that the race was close between Miller and Murkowski. Then he tipped his hand, adding “what we want to make sure of is that the Democrat doesn’t win.” That cut me to the quick. It was no longer speculation. I had it from the horse’s mouth. Cornyn reiterated the point later in an MSNBC interview stressing that it “would be a disaster if the Democrat won Alaska.” The reality is that he had to have known that wasn’t possible. A Hellenthal poll in the final week showed McAdams twenty-one points behind. Cornyn’s pledge to do “everything we can to ensure Joe Miller’s victory in November” was a lie. He would later boast that the NRSC never attacked Murkowski, adding that she was a professional who knew the drill. “But fortunately it all turned out well. It had a happy ending,” he said.
