... and why are they still in charge?
Here in the nuthouse, we have all been puzzled by the erratic performance of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). He's had his moments, like this one, or more recently even this one. My favorite, of course, is when he sent the wingers into a frenzy by saying what we all know - that the war is lost.
More often though, Reid has had long stretches where his leadership results in things like the heinous FISA bill, or the new and improved, no-fuss filibuster, or the most recent travesty, the MoveOn ad rebuke.
Where in hell is Harry getting his political advice?
Well, someone spilled the beans to Huffpo, and now Huffpo has done us all the inestimable favor of laying out exactly who is dishing out all that awful advice to Harry Reid.
According to Huffpo:
Among those who meet regularly in the Senate leader's office are Jim Margolis, a senior partner at the consulting firm GMMB and an adviser to presidential candidate Sen., Barack Obama, D-IL; Doug Sosnik, a political strategist and adviser to presidential candidate Sen. Chris Dodd, D-CT; Mark Mellman, a pollster for Reid; and Stephanie Cutter, formerly a staffer with Reid and now head of the consulting firm, Cutter Media Group. In addition, Paul Begala and pollster Stan Greenberg - both prominent advisers to former president Bill Clinton - have sat in on strategy meetings, as has Susan McCue, Reid's former chief of staff.
Now few of these people are household names, unless you live in a very strange house, but a little googling reveals what a coup Harry has achieved in building his cabinet. He's reunited the dream team that brought us the 2004 Kerry for President campaign!
Again, according to Huffpo:
According to several sources, the majority of these consultants were touting the efficacy of a compromise with Republicans on Iraq legislation as recently as last week.
So just who the hell are these dopes?
Taking it from the top we have Jim Margolis. Margolis and his DC-based GMMB consultancy were Kerry's original ad team but were ousted prior to the general by Bob Shrum. Per the Wapo via Markos:
Margolis's departure appears to be an outgrowth of long-simmering tensions with another top Kerry adviser, Bob Shrum, over compensation. Shrum and Margolis have clashed over ad strategy, but more important, the two have locked horns over how their respective political consulting firms would divide the tens of millions of dollars Kerry is expected to spend through the November election.
That could cut both ways. Kerry won the primary (with Margolis) and lost the general (without Margolis). Well, from the Center for Public Integrity's profile of Bob Shrum:
Shrum and another Kerry media adviser, Jim Margolis of the political consulting firm GMMB, were also involved in the formation of a consortium they named Riverfront Media, created exclusively for the campaign to produce most of Kerry's television ads and to make the media buys. Riverfront received more than $150 million in payments from the Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee, the Center found.
In the spring of 2004, Shrum and his partners had a dispute with Margolis regarding how they would be paid by the Kerry campaign, according to Joe Klein's book, Politics Lost. There had been a handshake agreement to split the profits evenly. But, when the Kerry campaign reduced the 9 percent commission the consultants would receive from television buys, there was trouble. Shrum and his partners reportedly wanted more than half of the final cut. According to media accounts, Margolis wouldn't agree to that, and in the end, his firm ceased its involvement in creating Kerry's ads, but continued to purchase media time.
He may, or may not, be a bad guy personally, but if there's anything that screams DC insider it's that one line - $150 million in payments from the Kerry campaign and the DNC.
Margolis is also a big wheel in the Obama campaign. If you're pro-Obama, but Reid's reaching across the aisle strategy drives you crazy then you got some 'splainin to do because they're channeling the same message advice from the same message guy.
Then there's Clinton White House Political Director and former Dodd chief of staff Doug Sosnik. Compared to GMMB, his wisdom can be had for a song - $10,000 to $20,000 depending on how far from DC he has to travel. Hopefully Harry is getting Doug's advice in DC and saving himself the extra ten grand. Sosnik co-authored "Applebee's America" with Bush strategist Matthew Dowd and received this positive review from SusanG back in October 06. Sosnik is also president of The New West Project, an attempt to capitalize and expand on Dem's 06 success in the Mountain West. Left in the West has a couple of dry takes on that effort here and here.
And Mark Mellman - Reid's pollster? A Clintonista, polling technician. Since this is a hit piece, I should be saying something snotty about him, but after sampling his commentary for TheHill.com, I pretty much agreed with him. Judge for yourself.
As for Carville BFF Paul Begala, who can forget his unintentionally revealing attack on the 50-state strategy, on CNN back in May of 06?
BLITZER: Very quickly, is Howard Dean in trouble?
BEGALA: No. I think Candy's report was spot on.
He -- yes, he's in trouble, in that campaign managers, candidates, are really angry with him. He has raised $74 million and spent $64 million. He says it's a long-term strategy. But what he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose. That's not how you build a party. You win elections. That's how you build a party.
You can't plant yourself any more firmly in the "people don't count" camp than that. You build a party by winning elections. Not, you win elections by building a party. (Boy, do we have it backwards around here, eh?) The party itself is apparently a bit of epherema conjured from serious behind the scenes wheeling and dealing by "senior political advisers".
Also remember that this was back in May 06 when 50-state hadn't yet succeeded. Here's the senior Democratic strategist unloading both barrels on the DNC Chair on national TV. Now part of Reid's cabinet. Great.
Stan Greenberg is, like Mellman, another Clinton era pollster, and also, like Mellman, a guy I can't disagree with, yet. That's probably because he sticks to his knitting, asking the questions in his polls and extrapolating (but only a little) the implications. His presentation at yk07 was a big hit, as he told attendees to think big. The worst thing I can say about him, and it's a big one, is that he's an unapologetic Carville BFF as evidenced by their continuing association in Democracy Corps. If you identify DC-insiderism as the problem, and I do, then a guy who helps Carville stay on a national stage is part of the problem.
Susan McCue - Every group of advisers has that one person whose loyalty to the advisee is unquestioned. In this group, McCue seems to be it. A former chief of staff to Reid, she's now CEO of the ONE Campaign - an antipoverty group or as hotline called it the Bono thingie. She has, as far as I can tell, no independent profile other than an occasional mention in John Solomon hit pieces on Reid.
Stephanie Cutter didn't ring a bell - until I plugged her name into the Tubes and the bad news came oozing out. Her coming out party was apparently as Kerry's press secretary in '04. While there, she made friends and influenced people all over the Democratic base by, on the occasion of Saddam Hussein's capture, sending out a mass email to the press "on background" claiming that Dean's antiwar stance was politically driven. Trouble is, the "on background" stamp doesn't work the way she thought it did and Adam Nagourney immediately outed her in the New York Times.
Yup, that Stephanie Cutter. It gets worse. From Newsweek's insider account of the 2004 campaign at msnbc.com:
Cutter had been the object of endless complaining by reporters and campaign staffers. She was considered too slow and too controlling, not nimble or clever. Tired of watching her berate interns and alienate reporters with vituperative e-mails after the most mildly critical stories, Kerry staffers snidely made a verb of her e-mail name (scutter@johnkerry.com). "To Scutter" meant to try to control or dominate. Its second meaning was cruder, "to f--- something up."
So there you have it. Two message guys (Margolis and Sosnik), two pollsters (Mellman and Greenberg), one media guru (Cutter), one Reid loyalist (McCue) and a partridge in a pear tree (Begala).
Where, from that group, is Harry's lame-ass, let-them-off-easy-on-the-filibusters, reach-across-the-aisle crappe coming from? My guess would be some combination of Begala, Margolis and Sosnik plus Cutter whose media focus puts her too close to the Broderistas on a daily basis. I can't believe that Mellman and Greenberg are part of it, because they both seem to poll the right questions and draw the right conclusions from them. McCue? Who knows?
To Hit, Or Not To Hit
I originally titled this diary "An Unabashed Hit Piece". Was this a hit piece? Sure, in an important way. I came into this thinking Reid's advisors were the problem and cherry picked evidence to prove the point. My descriptions of these people are shallow Google scrapings. Are they wrong? Yes and no. In the details and snide implications, maybe they are, but the inescapable conclusion you can take away from the aggregation of evidence is this:
Reid has assembled, and apparently relies on the advice of people who are either mired in the Centrist (Bill) Clinton Era, or whose claim to fame was guiding John Kerry to defeat in 2004. If Harry Reid is making his own mess, these people need to work harder to get him on track. But if, as we all suspect, Harry is paying a shitload of money for this advice and doing what all people who pay shitloads of money for advice do - taking it - then these people are the problem. These are the DC-insiders guiding Senate Democratic strategy on a daily basis. If you think that strategy sucks, has sucked, and promises to continue sucking, then these are the people we need to question.