Category Archives: Campaign 2010

Running and Hiding From Media, Mark Kirk Blowing Illinois Senate Race

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Just several months ago, Illinois GOP Senate candidate, Rep. Mark Kirk, was flying high — and a solid front runner to win Barack Obama’s Senate seat while Democrat Alexi Giannoulias was being dogged by a family banking scandal.

Giannoulias still has severe problems and high negatives, but Kirk, reeling from reporting about exaggerations and embellishments of his military record and other biographical info, is literally on the run from the media. Its absurd, and his communications team must deal with this immediately to stem the damage.

Crain’s Chicago Business reports today that Kirk “literally ran out the hotel door rather than answer questions.” He “bolted” with the “media in hot pursuit” and jumped into the back seat of a black SUV “which instantly peeled out.”

Kirk now has two big problems: first, not adequately dealing with his embellishment problem (or being able to change the subject by launching a new line of attack on Giannoulias), and, second, appearing ridiculous by fleeing the media.

Kirk is blowing this Senate race, and his actions, and those of his staff, are not inspiring a lot of confidence among GOP campaign watchers. Fortunately, there’s still time to right the ship.

New York Times Botches Editing of Blumenthal Story; Facts and Context Inexplicably Omitted

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The New York Times‘ initial story about Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal’s Vietnam exaggeration scandal is an abysmal effort from the standpoint of accuracy and context.

The situation developed when the Times reported that Blumenthal had repeatedly distorted his military service. The story included quotations and a video of Blumenthal saying at a 2008 event that he had “served in Vietnam.” The newspaper also said Blumenthal intimated more than once that he was a victim of the abuse heaped on Vietnam veterans upon their return home.

A longer version of the video posted by GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon also shows Blumenthal at the beginning of his speech correctly characterizing his service by saying that he “served in the military, during the Vietnam era.”

Blumenthal getting the quote right earlier in the speech doesn’t change the fact that he misled about his service later in that same speech, as Greg Sargent points out.  And its true that The Times uncovered other examples of Blumenthal appearing to mislead about his service, or at least not doing anything to correct misimpressions about it.

But the 2008 speech is by far the single most damning piece of evidence against Blumenthal.

The other quotes are just not quite as conclusive. And the fact that he got it right, if narrowly so, earlier in the speech raises at least the possibility that he didn’t intend to mislead later on, even if it doesn’t prove this one way or the other.

BUT even if you don’t believe the longer video is exculpatory in any way, as The Times says, there’s no conceivable reason for leaving out the fuller context and letting readers make the call for themselves. It seems obvious that when dealing with a story this explosive, you would want to err on the side of more context, rather than less.

You don’t have to be a Medill graduate to figure that out.

Kay Bailey Hutchison’s Road to Political Oblivion

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As Clayton Williams’ press secretary during the 1990 campaign for governor against Ann Richards, I flew around Texas with the candidate on many an occasion accompanied by a variety of surrogates. Kay Bailey Hutchison, then State Treasurer, was enormously appealing on the stump. It was obvious she would one day be elected to statewide office, and equally obvious she had the ambition, desire and skill to do so.

Twenty years later, having served as a U.S. Senator since her 1993 special election against Bob Krueger, Kay’s political career is now over after having run among the most depressing, desultory campaigns in Texas history. We at the Williams campaign lost our race due to an accumulation of gaffes — which admittedly could have been ameliorated by an improved media control and press access strategy. I’ll take a hit for that.

But Kay’s “campaign” never had a rationale, never had a message, never had an overarching theme, and was never able to avoid being sucked into Rick Perry’s simple but highly effective DC vs. TX message strategy. She made no gaffe’s — she just had nothing to say. The one visual image of her stuck in one’s mind is the worried look on her face throughout the contest, with a permanent furrowed-brow.

Could she have won with a better campaign? Still doubtful.

One of her primary problems was that she’d never, really, been forced to run in a highly competitive environment. The ’93 Krueger race was relatively painless. Quite simply, candidates unaccustomed to the complexities and ugliness of statewide contests — especially in a state like Texas — are destined to fail. Such was the case in Harold Ford’s 2006 race against Bob Corker in Tennessee — whereby we were able to dismantle Ford in the last two to three weeks with a barrage of attacks.

The volume of incoming hits on Kay, just like the volume of incoming hits on Ford, were too much to assimilate for the simple reason they’d never been subjected to it. For this simple basic reason, battle-tested statewide candidates almost always have a leg up on opponents accustomed to safe, uncompetitive elections. This was clearly the case in this Texas contest.

\”A Conversation with Mike Baselice and Matthew Dowd\”

For an excellent review and breakdown of the Hutchinson-Perry race, the Texas Tribune-sponsored “Conversation” with Perry pollster Mike Baselice and former Bush strategist Matt Dowd is enormously insightful and worth watching.