New York Magazine this week did a penetrating report that reveals exactly who is the current leader and gatekeeper for the Republican Party, and it's not Rush Limbaugh or Rinse Priebus. The truth is that just like Marlon Brando in The Godfather, every potentially Republican candidate has to first be blessed and Kiss the Ring of Roger Ailes.
Ailes is the most successful executive in television by a wide margin, and he has been so for more than a decade. He is also, in a sense, the head of the Republican Party, having employed five prospective presidential candidates and done perhaps more than anyone to alter the balance of power in the national media in favor of the Republicans. “Because of his political work”—Ailes was a media strategist for Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush—“he understood there was an audience,” Ed Rollins, the veteran GOP consultant, told me. “He knew there were a couple million conservatives who were a potential audience, and he built Fox to reach them.”
For most of his tenure, the roles of network chief and GOP kingmaker have been in perfect synergy. Ailes’s network has dominated the cable news race for most of the past decade, and for much of that time, Fox News attracted more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. Throughout the George W. Bush years, the network’s patriotic cheerleading helped to marginalize the Democrats. And President Obama—he of the terrorist fist bump and uncertain ancestry and socialist leanings—turned out to be just as good for ratings, while galvanizing a conservative army that crushed the Democrats in the 2010 midterms. This double-barreled success is a testament to Ailes’s ferocious competitive streak. “Roger just likes to win,” former McCain adviser and longtime Ailes friend Charlie Black told me. “He’s very competitive in any game he’s in.”
Unfortunately for Ailes, all five of his inhouse Candidates to be - Gingrich, Palin, Huckabee, Santorium and Bolton - were all getting lousy poll numbers.
So he tried to recruit a ringer.
Now this isn't news to anyone whose been seriously paying attention. There have been documentary movies about how Fox News is essentially the Full-Time Press Office for the GOP. But usually the media tends to refrain from criticizing the integrity of the media. Usually when anyone suggests that Fox News exists largely to push forward the agenda of the Republican Party it comes from Democrats or Democrat Friendlies like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and the like.
Not this time.
This New York Magazine article is a serious and probing as a report from Rolling Stone. And could be, luck willing, as influential as the report from that Magazine that ended the Military Career of Gen. McChrystal as the head of our campaign in Afghanistan.
And, for all his programming genius, he was more interested in a real narrative than a television narrative—he wanted to elect a president. All he had to do was watch Fox’s May 5 debate in South Carolina to see what a mess the field was—a mess partly created by the loudmouths he’d given airtime to and a tea party he’d nurtured. And, not incidentally, a strong Republican candidate would be good for his business, too. A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race. Last summer, he’d invited Christie to dinner at his upstate compound along with Rush Limbaugh, and like much of the GOP Establishment, he fell hard for Christie, who nevertheless politely turned down Ailes’s calls to run.
Oh well, so much for Superman. How about Ultraman?
Ailes had also hoped that David Petraeus would run for president, but Petraeus too has decided to sit this election out, choosing to stay on the counterterrorism front lines as the head of Barack Obama’s CIA.
So when Christie wouldn't run, Ailes tried to recruit David Petreaus? Not exactly something you would expect the head of a News Organization to be doing, eh?
Well, it seems Ailes has been recruiting and blessing GOP candidates for some time.
All the 2012 candidates know that Ailes is a crucial constituency. “You can’t run for the Republican nomination without talking to Roger,” one GOPer told me. “Every single candidate has consulted with Roger.” But he hasn’t found any of them, including the adults in the room—Jon Huntsman, Mitch Daniels, Mitt Romney—compelling. “He finds flaws in every one,” says a person familiar with his thinking.
And it's also interesting what he thinks of some of those potential candidates on his own payroll.
“He thinks things are going in a bad direction,” another Republican close to Ailes told me. “Roger is worried about the future of the country. He thinks the election of Obama is a disaster. He thinks Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid. He helped boost her up. People like Sarah Palin haven’t elevated the conservative movement.”
And that opinion of Palin has apparently been borne out, when she refused to follow his advice.
Ailes began to doubt Palin’s political instincts. He thought she was getting bad advice from her kitchen cabinet and saw her erratic behavior as a sign that she is a “loose cannon,” as one person close to him put it. A turning point in their relationship came during the apex of the media debate over the Tucson shooting. As the media pounced on Palin’s rhetoric, Palin wanted to fight back. She felt it was deeply unfair that commentators were singling her out. Ailes agreed but told her to stay out of it. He thought if she stayed quiet, she would score a victory.
“Lie low,” he told her. “If you want to respond later, fine, but do not interfere with the memorial service.”
Palin ignored Ailes’s advice and went ahead and released her now-infamous “blood libel” video the morning Obama traveled to Tucson. For Ailes, the move was further evidence that Palin was flailing around off-message. “Why did you call me for advice?” he wondered out loud to colleagues.
Rather than making decisions based on News-worthiness, Ailes works his stable like a series of chess pieces. Push Brett Baer forward. Minimizing the influence of Beck by transitioning him to "Specials". Using Bill O'Reilly to tamp down the Birther Noise. All moves designed to move toward an end, putting a Republican in the White House.
“Fox gave the tea party the oxygen to prosper,” Chris Ruddy, the CEO of the conservative magazine Newsmax, told me. “Politically, it was brilliant. There were so many disaffected people after the Bush years. It’s like the book Blink. He’s just got it. We’re going into an election period, and he doesn’t want Fox to be seen as a front of the Republican Party.”
Which is become Fox is the Front the Republican Party. That became even more clear when Murdoch began to soften politically, and even flirted with an Obama endorsement through his New York Post: Ailes threatened to quit.
It got so bad that when Obama approached his eventual election, there were actual back-channel attempts to broken a "peaceful settlement" between Fox and the Obama White House as if they were opposing nations on the verge of a violent confrontation.
There had been back-channel efforts to broker a détente between Ailes and Obama. In the run-up to the election, Russell Simmons, who has built an unlikely relationship with Ailes, placed private calls to both Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett and John Moody to do shuttle diplomacy. “They couldn’t get Obama on the phone; I suggested they have a dialogue,” Simmons told me.
You think he'd be eager to chat after all the "Obama is a Racist, Kenyan, Muslim, without a birth certificate" coverage?
Maybe he was paying attention.
Vyan