Jon Ward

IRS Claim It Didn't Discriminate Against Tea Party Has 3 Problems

2013-05-17T18:04:35-04:00

WASHINGTON –- The head of the IRS on Friday insisted that tea party groups were not targeted for extra scrutiny, but were caught up in a clumsy dragnet by government employees trying to take shortcuts to being more efficient.

Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller's frequent refrain was that of the 298 applications for 501(c)(4) nonprofit status that were selected by IRS agents for further screening, only about 70 were tea party groups.

The actual numbers are a little different than what Miller, who has resigned, told members of the House Ways and Means Committee, according to the report from the IRS inspector general. The report, released this week, showed that there were 72 tea party groups, 11 with the phrase "9/12" in their name, and 13 with "patriots" in their name. So there were 96 tea party-type groups, and 202 groups of other types, that got extra IRS attention.

"Organizations from all walks and all persuasions were pulled in," Miller said. He insisted in his opening statement that the targeting of tea party groups was "not an act of partisanship."

So far, there is at least one example of a liberal group receiving the same treatment as the conservative groups -– secondary screening and invasive questions for more information. But a flood of examples has not yet materialized.

But there are three problems with Miller's assertion that conservative tea party groups were not singled out disproportionately with unfair treatment:

1. The list of 298 groups is not public, so we don't know the other groups that are undergoing secondary screening. House Republicans have asked the IRS for the names of all groups under special review, but the IRS has said it is forbidden by the federal code from releasing the information. That of course didn't stop the IRS from leaking the names of nine conservative groups under review to ProPublica, a nonprofit journalism website, in November. Miller on Friday said this leak was "inadvertent," but did not explain further.

2. The IRS only issued one BOLO. There was only one political "be on the lookout," or BOLO, term from 2010 to 2012, an official with the inspector general's office told HuffPost. The only BOLO was the one relating to tea party groups. There were no political search terms for liberal or progressive groups.

"There were other BOLOs issued during this time," the inspector general official said. "This was the only BOLO that referred to potential political cases and had anything to do with political criteria."

Miller admitted this under questioning from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis). "So there were no 'progressive' or 'organizing' buzzwords that were used for targeting, is that correct?" Ryan asked Miller. "That's correct," Miller said.

3. No tea party group applications for non-profit status were approved for 27 months, staring in February 2010, while numerous liberal groups sailed through the process, USA Today reported this week.

Perhaps it will emerge that of the 202 non-tea party groups whose applications are being held up, a large number are liberal or progressive. But the fact that the tea party BOLO was the only search term with a political focus during this time period suggests that's unlikely.

Still, the question remains: Who are those other groups?

Ryan told HuffPost that some may be religious and anti-abortion groups.

"We're getting lots of credible, consistent allegations about religious organizations, from groups, of religious organizations being targeted," Ryan said.

When asked for specifics, Ryan referred HuffPost to Ways and Means Committee staff. A Ways and Means spokeswoman said she had no information readily available on the topic.

Lois Lerner, Key IRS Official In Tea Party Scandal, Hasn't Agreed To Testify Before Congress

2013-05-16T18:21:30-04:00

While former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, has agreed to testify before Congress next week, the senior manager who oversaw the division that targeted tea party groups has yet to commit to do so.

Lois G. Lerner, who managed the IRS exempt organizations unit that approved applications for nonprofit status, is in Montreal, according to her attorney, a congressional source said, and has not yet said if she will come to Washington for testimony next week. Lerner has hired William W. Taylor III, the lawyer who represented Dominique Strauss Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund head accused of sexual assault by a New York hotel housekeeper, the source said.

Shulman, who told a congressional committee in March 2012 that the IRS had conducted "absolutely no targeting" of conservative tea party groups, will appear before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee next Wednesday. Lerner's presence has been requested. Others who have agreed to appear include J. Russell George, the treasury inspector general for tax administration, and Neal S. Wolin, deputy treasury secretary.

On Friday morning, George, the inspector general, will testify before the House Ways and Means Committee, along with Steven Miller, the acting commissioner of the IRS who is so far the only government official to lose his job in the scandal. President Barack Obama announced Wednesday that Miller had resigned.

Marco Rubio Takes On Obama's Transformative Narrative

2013-05-15T16:51:56-04:00

One of President Obama's central promises as a candidate for the White House in 2008 was that he would transform the culture of Washington and the country's politics.

"Change has come to America," he declared the night he won the presidency.

There is the hint of a fledgling counter narrative emerging now - as Obama deals with multiple scandals - from the man who many think wants to replace Obama in the White House in 2016: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla). In a speech on the floor of the Senate Wednesday, Rubio said the president has changed the culture of Washington, but for the worse.

Rubio began by pointing to the treatment of State Department personnel who were on the ground in Benghazi, Libya and have since said they were pressured to keep quiet, he pointed to to the IRS scandal, and then to the AP scandal. But Rubio said that "none of this is new."

"What we see emerging here is a pattern, a culture of intimidation, of hardball politics that we saw both on the campaign trial, and now through the apparatus of government," he said.

As evidence he cited the case of Frank VanderSloot, an Idaho businessman who donated to a super PAC supporting Republican Mitt Romney and was listed by the Obama campaign as one of several ”wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records," and then was subsequently the subject of audits by the IRS and the Labor Department. No definitive proof has been offered or found to connect the Obama campaign appearance and the audits, but the IRS scandal of the past week has given more reason for those who speculate about a connection to do so.

Rubio also mentioned the improper IRS leak of nonprofit applications from conservative groups to ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization, which may have been a violation of the law, as well as the example of the National Labor Relations Board's complaint against Boeing for moving a plant from Washington state to South Carolina.

Rubio then launched into a section of his speech in which he accused Obama of worsening the culture of the nation's capital.

"This is what you get when an administration is all about politics. This administration is a 365-day-a-year, year round political campaign. Every issues is a potliical campaign ... Every issue is a wedge. Few times in the history of this country has anyone used this office to drive more wedges among the American people than this president and this administration. And so yes, this is the culture that's been created: 'They're bad and we're good. Our enemies are bad people. The people who disagree with us on policy are bad people. If you don't support us on guns, you don't care about children and families. You don't support some measure against religious liberty, you're waging a war on women.'

On issue after issue, a deliberate attempt to divide the American people against each other for the purposes of winning an election. That is the culture that's been created. And that culture leads to this kind of behavior ... I'm not saying someone in the White House picked up the phone and said, 'Do these audits. Leak this information.' I am saying that when you create a culture where what's rewarded is political advantage ... it leads to this kind of behavior throughout your administration."

And Rubio also said, in strong terms, that he is opposed to Tom Perez's nomination for Secretary of Labor. Perez, said Rubio, "has an admirable personal story which I admire and applaud, but ... has a history of using the government and his position in government to intimidate people to do what he wants them to do."

"I would submit to you that Mr. Perez's nomination is bad for the country in any time, but in this administration, in this political culture, after what we have learned over the last few days, even more so. I hate to single him out but that's one of the pending ones before us," Rubio said.

Here is video of the speech:

Stuart Stevens, Romney Adviser, Says 2012 Was Not A Fair Fight

2013-05-15T12:51:40-04:00

WASHINGTON -- Stu Stevens' recounting of the 2012 campaign is a tale of woe.

The former senior strategist for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign on Wednesday played up the campaign's disadvantages -- so much so that he seemed to be arguing the election was unwinnable.

Stevens, who is now helping his business partner Russ Schriefer on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's reelection campaign, has made only a few on-the-record appearances since November, most of them in formal panel settings or on network Sunday shows. But he agreed to take questions from a handful of reporters at a breakfast hosted Wednesday by National Review. Wearing a plain black suit, a blue shirt open at the collar and standard black dress shoes and socks, Stevens was his usual self: charming and funny, but slippery when asked to confront the shortcomings of the Romney campaign.

Romney staffers have notably refrained from back-biting after the election, but in private conversations some have said that aside from the candidate himself, they hold Stevens primarily responsible for the campaign's many mistakes. One of the biggest was betting on the idea that the economy would continue to be so bad that voters would throw the incumbent out, rather than encouraging Romney to make himself an acceptable, even compelling alternative.

Stevens, however, had a ready list of reasons why the 2012 result was out of his -- as well as Romney's and the campaign's -- control.

He talked at length about President Barack Obama's money advantage: "Obama raised $1.2 billion. So you think about it, the next incumbent president will raise, what, $2 billion?" Stevens said. He argued the next incumbent candidate will "face a challenger ... who will probably come out of the [primary] process broke."

"We've abolished the four-year term," he concluded.

Stevens talked about how Jen O'Malley-Dillon, a deputy campaign manager for Obama, spent years setting up the president's voter outreach and grassroots mobilization efforts. "These are just monumental advantages that they have," he said.

Describing his reaction to a question about why the Romney campaign lost the battle to define its candidate, Stevens said he felt "kind of like Travis at the Alamo being asked, 'How did you let yourself get surrounded?' It wasn't our choice. There were a lot of soldiers out there."

But when asked about criticisms that Obama's campaign was run more like an efficient business than Romney's, Stevens -- who was employed by a media firm, American Rambler Productions, that was paid millions of dollars by the campaign for a multitude of services -- backtracked from his focus on resources.

"They're always talking about how Obama had more people. They talk about this with the media buys," Stevens said, a reference to what Politico called Stevens' "unusual in-house ad strategy."

"It's hysterical. You know, Obama had 27 people doing this. It's like, that's good? ... When did we start bragging that, like, having more people doing something is a good thing?" Stevens asked. "I thought it was supposed to be the other way -- that the fewer people that could do a good job is like a good thing."

Yet seconds later Stevens was back to decrying the Romney campaign's lack of resources as compared to the president's: "We didn't have Air Force One. We didn't have the White House. You know, they had 800 people in Florida."

Stevens did point to other losing factors for Romney: First, the economy improved during the election cycle; second, right track/wrong track numbers in public opinion polls went the wrong direction for Romney; and the president's response to Hurricane Sandy improved Obama's favorability rating just before the election. All true.

And he did admit that Obama won because the president had a superior message, especially for minority voters; Stevens said it might be true that the Romney campaign "could have done a better job capturing people's imaginations."

Finally this reporter simply asked him, was the race unwinnable?

"No, no," Stevens said. "Look, if 220 some-odd [thousand] people change their votes, we would have won the electoral college; so anything that's that close, it's a close-run thing. We made mistakes, they made mistakes."

I pressed Stevens on whether there was anything the Romney campaign could have done differently to win, given the structural disadvantages he had highlighted.

"If I had one week in that campaign it was the South Carolina primary," Stevens said. "The best thing we could have done is win the primary early. But what was the South Carolina primary about? The debates. So you're literally a bystander in that situation, pretty much, I think, right?"

That's something of an answer.

This story has been updated to make clear that Stevens was an employee of American Rambler Productions, not an owner.

IRS Tea Party Scandal: White House Did Not Drive Investigation, Inspector General Says

2013-05-14T20:30:43-04:00

WASHINGTON -- The IRS Inspector General said Tuesday that incompetence, not malice, was behind the tax agency’s heavy scrutiny of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the lead-up to the 2012 elections.

A 48-page IG report explicitly stated that the IRS behavior was “not politically biased,” that it was due to lower-level staff who did not understand their jobs and sometimes acted insubordinately, and that it was not driven by the White House.

The findings come just days after it was revealed that the IRS had singled out groups with words like "Tea Party" in their names -- a politically explosive revelation that raised concerns over government discrimination against political opponents.

All IRS officials interviewed, however, told the IG that the scrutiny of such groups was “not influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS.” Rather than a scandal, the IG said, the Tea Party probes had merely given “the appearance that the IRS is not impartial in conducting its mission.”

The IG did have two outstanding issues of disagreement with the agency's top brass over how to ensure that such abuse does not happen again, and said the IRS has not yet fully resolved the issue, despite assurances from officials.

“Although the IRS has taken some action, it will need to do more so that the public has reasonable assurance that applications are processed without unreasonable delay in a fair and impartial manner in the future,” said the report.

IRS management opposed the IG’s calls to explicitly articulate why agents choose applications for nonprofit status for additional rounds of scrutiny, as well as to post online guidance for IRS agents on how to process applications from groups that may be political. In light of this resistance, the report said a future audit was "being considered to assess" how the IRS implemented new policies.

Despite laying much of the blame at the feet of front-line IRS employees and middle managers, the final IG report did point to “ineffective management” that allowed the mistakes. In particular, attention is sure to focus on Lois G. Lerner, who headed the agency's office of Exempt Organizations, Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division.

Lerner was the IRS official who first brought the agency's misbehavior to public attention with comments at a professional conference last Friday that were quickly picked up by news media outlets.

Lerner was given a summary of the agency's Tea Party investigation in April 2010, as HuffPost reported Monday, and after she was briefed of the improper probes in June 2011, she instructed middle managers to stop focusing on Tea Party groups. But those subordinates -- who are not named in the report -- were able to flout her instructions and to rewrite the “be-on-the-lookout” criteria to reinsert terms that encompassed some Tea Party-type organizations.

“The team of specialists subsequently changed the criteria in January 2012 without executive approval because they believed the July 2011 criteria were too broad,” the report said.

An IRS spokesman said in a statement emailed to HuffPost that "there was no intent to hide this issue, but rather we waited until [the IG's office] completed their fact finding, made recommendations, and we reviewed their findings."

Tea Party groups had complained over the past two years that they were being targeted for IRS scrutiny because of their ideology or political point of view, with excessive information demands from the agency. HuffPost reported Monday that the IRS went into damage-control mode after higher-ups -- including acting commissioner Steven Miller -- expressed concern in March and April of 2012 over press attention to the Tea Party inquiries.

The IG document released Tuesday made repeated mention of IRS officials in the Cincinnati office -- which had been set up as a centralized clearinghouse for secondary inspection of flagged nonprofit applications -- who did not know how to do their jobs. “There appeared to be some confusion by Determinations Unit specialists and applicants on what activities are allowed” by 501(c)(4) groups, the report stated on page 14.

The report was more emphatic on page 18, stating, “Specialists lacked knowledge of what activities are allowed” by tax-exempt, nonprofit 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups.

Part of this, the report said, was due to unclear guidance in the law. “Regulations do not define how to measure whether social welfare is an organization’s ‘primary activity,’” the IG said.

In a response to the IG report, Joseph Grant, the acting IRS commissioner for tax-exempt and government entities, also pointed to confusion over how to enforce the law. “There are no bright lines for what constitutes political campaign intervention,” Grant wrote.

The IG found that of 96 so-called Tea Party, Patriot or 9/12 groups that were given extra screening by the agency's Cincinnati office, 79 of showed evidence of “significant political campaign intervention.” In all, 298 applications were held up for additional scrutiny, and the IG noted the fact that 202 were not from Tea Party groups as evidence the agency's actions were "not politically biased."

The IG also pointed out that some campaign intervention is allowed by (c)(4) groups, as long as promoting social welfare remains their primary purpose. IRS agents did not know how to determine whether groups applying for nonprofit status were meeting those criteria, the report said. So in May 2012, Washington officials gave “a two-day workshop to the team of specialists ... to train them on what activities are allowable ... including lobbying and political campaign intervention," according to the report.

The lack of awareness among IRS agents about what activities (c)(4) groups could engage in “created burden on the organizations that were required to gather and forward information that was not needed by the Determinations Unit and led to delays in processing the applications," the IG found. IRS agents asked Tea Party groups for lists of donors, resumes of board officials and leadership, whether members of the group or family members had run or planned to run for political office, and other excessively intrusive questions.

Republicans were not satisfied with the IG report and said they would continue to raise questions about the agency's actions at a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday.

“We still do not know why the targeting began, how extensive it was, who initiated it and who knew about it,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said the report “raises more questions than it answers.”

“Today’s report magnifies our concerns about the breadth and depth of the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of organizations for their political beliefs,” he said.

UPDATE: 8:40 p.m. ET -- President Barack Obama responded to the IRS IG's findings in a statement Tuesday evening:

I have now had the opportunity to review the Treasury Department watchdog’s report on its investigation of IRS personnel who improperly targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. And the report’s findings are intolerable and inexcusable. The federal government must conduct itself in a way that’s worthy of the public’s trust, and that’s especially true for the IRS. The IRS must apply the law in a fair and impartial way, and its employees must act with utmost integrity. This report shows that some of its employees failed that test.

I’ve directed Secretary Lew to hold those responsible for these failures accountable, and to make sure that each of the Inspector General’s recommendations are implemented quickly, so that such conduct never happens again. But regardless of how this conduct was allowed to take place, the bottom line is, it was wrong. Public service is a solemn privilege. I expect everyone who serves in the federal government to hold themselves to the highest ethical and moral standards. So do the American people. And as President, I intend to make sure our public servants live up to those standards every day.

UPDATE: 9:30 p.m. ET -- Treasury Secretary Jack Lew released a statement as well:

“I was deeply troubled to learn of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration’s finding that IRS personnel used unacceptable terms and criteria to determine if certain groups should receive additional scrutiny when applying for tax-exempt status. While the Inspector General found no evidence that any individual or organization outside the IRS influenced the decision to use these criteria, these actions were inappropriate and did not reflect the high standards which I expect and the public deserves. Like the American people, I have zero tolerance for any action that could undermine public confidence in the impartial and non-partisan administration of the tax code.

“Although the Inspector General found that the IRS put a stop to this type of screening as of May 2012, it should never have happened and must not happen again. I strongly agree with the President about the need for accountability at the IRS, and I expect the IRS to implement the Inspector General’s recommendations without delay.”

Read the IRS Inspector General's report below:

IRS IG Report

IRS Abandoned Tea Party Probes Due To 'Concerns' Over Media Attention

2013-05-13T23:29:04-04:00

WASHINGTON -– At least one senior IRS official knew the agency was targeting tea party groups with what the agency later called "troubling questions" for months before it stopped. And when the IRS finally did change course, it did so in response to mounting public scrutiny in the press, documents show.

Lois G. Lerner, in charge of the IRS unit that reviews applications from groups for tax-exempt status, said at first on Friday –- when she inadvertently revealed the IRS' actions –- that she had found out about her agency's abuses from news media reports. But over the weekend, that claim was revealed to be false. Lerner was briefed in detail about the matter on June 29, 2011, according to a timeline of IRS actions contained in an appendix to a report by the agency's inspector general, leaked over the weekend. The inspector general's full report is set for official release later this week.

The appendix, obtained by The Huffington Post on Monday, also shows that IRS officials began to express concern regarding media reports on their activities. In February and March of 2012, the timeline in the appendix of the report by the treasury inspector general for tax administration notes that "numerous news articles began to be published with complaints from Tea Party organizations," which led to congressional interest. On March 23 and March 27, top officials at the IRS -– including current acting commissioner Steven Miller –- "discussed concerns with the media attention the Tea Party applications were receiving."

The IRS said Monday that Miller and the agency commissioner at the time, Doug Shulman, did not learn details of their agency's tea party focus until May. President Barack Obama said Monday that he did not find out about the scandal until Lerner's offhand comment sparked a firestorm on Friday.

But the inspector general's timeline shows that Lerner may have been aware of the tea party targeting as early as April 2010. On April 19, 2010, there were 18 groups undergoing extra scrutiny because of their tea party affiliation when the first "sensitive case report" was written, and Lerner's office was given "a chart summarizing all sensitive case reports," according to the inspector general's report. An IRS spokesman did not respond to a question about how much detail was in that chart.

The number of tea party groups under examination had grown to more than 100 by June 2011, when Lerner is listed in the inspector general's report as getting her official briefing. The IRS asked the tea party groups to disclose such things as donors, names of family members who may plan to run for office, and printed copies of every page on their website and social media postings.

Lerner did order during that briefing that the IRS change its target terms for what kind of groups would have to go through the agency's rigorous review. The IRS "be-on-the-lookout" terms were changed a few days later from "various local organizations in the Tea Party movement" to "organizations involved with political, lobbying, or advocacy."

Yet Lerner's briefing ended with a commitment to "develop a guide sheet for processing these cases," and the intense questioning of tea party groups did not change. Letters were sent from the IRS office in Cincinnati, as well from at least one other office in Laguna Niguel, Calif., in January and early February 2012.

In addition, on Jan. 25, the "be-on-the-lookout" was changed again, from the more general terms introduced the previous summer to a more specific criteria: "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement."

A letter from the Laguna Niguel office on Jan. 31, 2012, to a group in Redding, Calif., called Patriots Educating Concerned Americans Now instructed the group to submit "additional information" in the form of answers to 25 questions, some of which had 10 sub-questions. The information requests included:

• A description of the duties of each member of the organizations' officers, directors or trustees, along with "names and addresses of each individuals employer/business, the nature of their employment/business, and the number of hours devoted to their employment business."

•A description of "the activities that the organization conducts that influence legislation."

•A submission of "copies of all contracts and agreements that the organization has entered into or plans to enter into."

•Details on intellectual property copyrights that the group planned to own.

•A full description of "what sources the organization will use in conducting its research activities" on government and policy subjects.

The first specific change in how the IRS was engaging these tea party groups did not happen, according to the inspector general's report, until Feb. 29, 2012, around the time that media reports were getting the IRS' attention. At this time, Lerner halted new requests for information, and discussed rescinding the IRS demand that groups print out their entire website. The second substantive change came on March 8, 2012, when Miller, then the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, told a unit within the IRS that if an applicant contacted them about "having to provide donor information, the Determinations Unit would allow them to not send the donor names but would inform them that the IRS may need it later."

By late April, the contours of a full-blown clean operation were taking shape. A senior official from Washington with a title that parodies bureaucratic officialdom –- the senior technical advisor to the acting tax exempt and government entities division commissioner -- paid a visit on April 23 to the "Determinations Unit in Cincinnati," which had been set up to deal with a huge jump in 501c4 applications following the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision.

On April 24, IRS officials had begun to "identify troubling questions, which organizations received them, and which members of the team of specialists asked them." The inspector general's report noted that "the results included the names of donors as a troubling question."

The request for donor names has become one of the hot-button issues in the IRS' targeting of tea party groups who were applying for 501c4 status, which would allow them to keep donors anonymous.

David French, an attorney for the American Center for Law and Justice, representing 27 tea party or liberty groups, said in an interview that groups involved in issue advocacy on the local level have increasingly felt the need to protect the names of members and donors.

"There is a palpable sense around the country that retribution awaits those who don't take the politically correct stance, particularly on social issues. There's a real concern that as politics has taken an uglier and uglier turn, you place your job at risk when you speak, in some extreme cases you place your family at risk when you speak," French said. "Anonymity has long been a valued part of our First Amendment jurisprudence."

Fifteen American Center for Law and Justice clients still do not have their tax-exempt status, said French, who has written about IRS requests that tea party group members give up information about members of their family.

In mid-May, IRS officials from Washington made another trip to Cincinnati to conduct a training session with IRS officials there, and officials in Washington "began reviewing all potential political cases began in Cincinnati." The "be-on-the-lookout" was changed to "organizations with indicators of significant amounts of political campaign intervention."

On May 21, IRS officials in Washington decided that donor information "could be destroyed or returned to the applicant if not used to make the final determination of tax-exempt status." And on June 4, the IRS apparently completed a total of 180 donor information requests, drafting a letter to the tea party groups "that provided donor information."

"The letter would inform the organizations that the information was destroyed," the inspector general's report states.

It's not clear if that letter was ever sent to any of the groups affected, one Republican congressional source said.

Lindsey Graham Fending Off Primary Challenge In South Carolina

2013-05-09T11:48:40-04:00

WASHINGTON -- In 2010, as the tea party was arriving on the political scene, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said the movement would "die out."

"The problem with the tea party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country," Graham said in a New York Times Magazine profile.

He continued to criticize the tea party into 2011 for not having a more constructive attitude, but also began to reach out to other Republican senators who arrived in 2010 with the support of the conservative grassroots movement, like Kentucky's Rand Paul and Utah's Mike Lee.

Yet Graham has also clashed with those two, and with newly elected Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has quickly become a strong ally of Paul and Lee. One of their biggest disagreements is over foreign policy, where Graham -- along with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) -- favors a more interventionist role for the U.S. than do the tea party senators.

Graham took a shot at Cruz just last Friday, watching the freshman senator speak to a state GOP dinner in Columbia, S.C. He told HuffPost immediately afterward that Cruz has "got to prove to the country, and to people in Texas ... that he can, you know, throw a punch and also solve a problem."

National tea-party types are still calling for Graham's scalp as the senator gears up for a 2014 reelection campaign.

"He's begging for a primary,” Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, told ABC News & Yahoo's TopLine on Wednesday.

And in South Carolina, anti-Graham forces tried, unsuccessfully, to change the nominating process from a primary to a convention. The latter format would allow the nomination to be driven more by the hard-core activists within the GOP, and would give them a better shot at unseating Graham.

Graham has drawn one Republican challenger so far, upstate businessman Richard Cash, and there are two others said to be leaning toward a run as well: state Sen. Lee Bright (Spartanburg), and Charleston businesswoman Nancy Mace. But the consensus among South Carolina Republicans is that all are long shots.

"None of the three have a great shot but Bright has some name ID and support," said Jonathan Hoffman, who was one of 16 Republicans, including former Gov. Mark Sanford, who ran in the Republican primary to fill the 1st District's congressional seat.

Political consultant and activist Drew McKissick said Cash's ground game in the 3rd Congressional District, where he was runner-up in a 2010 primary runoff, is "probably [the] best anyone's seen in years," but added, "that was just the 3rd [Congressional District]."

"No credible person seems to be getting in line. It's a little hard to believe," one South Carolina GOP operative said on background.

State Sen. Tom Davis, a Republican from Beaufort, is one name that some in the Palmetto State say could potentially pose a problem for Graham, but Davis has said he is not going to run. And of course the congressional delegation has a few names that have strong appeal to the grassroots: Rep. Mick Mulvaney from the 5th District, Rep. Jeff Duncan from the 3rd District, and Rep. Trey Gowdy from the 4th District.

The GOP operative said that Graham's political operation has managed to keep the most credible threats to Graham on the sidelines through bare-knuckle tactics.

"Graham's people are good. They keep Hoover-level type files on people who might run," the operative said. "They know where you live, who you sleep with, where you drink. And they're not afraid to tell you that they know that."

The one guy who might not be intimidated by that sort of thing? Mark Sanford. He won the 1st District seat's general election on Tuesday, and his skeletons have been on full display for a few years now.

Jason Richwine Dissertation On Low Hispanic IQ Puts Heritage On Defensive [FULL DOCUMENT]

2013-05-08T18:07:44-04:00

WASHINGTON - A conservative researcher's 2009 dissertation, which argued that Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. have substantially lower IQs than whites, put one of the biggest opponents to an immigration reform bill in Congress on the defensive on Wednesday.

The dissertation by Jason Richwine, then a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, argues that "[n]o one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against. From the perspective of Americans alive today, the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent."

The Washington Post first reported on Richwine's dissertation on Wednesday morning.

Richwine is now a quantitative analyst at The Heritage Foundation, and he was listed as a co-author on a paper the foundation released this week chronicling the potential economic costs of the the immigration bill currently being considered in the Senate.

Heritage and its president, former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), are leading the charge against the Senate proposal. But the foundation worked to distance itself from Richwine Wednesday in response to the dissertation, trying to salvage the reputation of the paper that Richwine co-authored with Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at Heritage.

"We believe that every person is created equal and that everyone should have equal opportunity to reach the ladder of success and climb as high as they can dream," Heritage said in a statement released by spokesman Mike Gonzalez.

Richwine was not at Heritage when he wrote the paper. In the acknowledgments section of his dissertation, he thanked the American Enterprise Institute, another conservative think tank in Washington, "for its generous support, without which this dissertation could not have been completed."

Richwine was a dissertation fellow at AEI prior to coming to Heritage in 2010, according to his Heritage bio.

"We welcome a rigorous, fact-based debate on the data, methodology, and conclusions of the Heritage study on the cost of amnesty. Instead, some have pointed to a Harvard dissertation written by Dr. Jason Richwine," Heritage said in its statement. "Dr. Richwine did not shape the methodology or the policy recommendations in the Heritage paper; he provided quantitative support to lead author Robert Rector. The dissertation was written while Dr. Richwine was a student at Harvard, supervised and approved by a committee of respected scholars."

"The Harvard paper is not a work product of The Heritage Foundation. Its findings do not reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation or the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to U.S. taxpayers, as race and ethnicity are not part of Heritage immigration policy recommendations," Heritage said in its statement.

Richwine said lower IQs among Hispanics in the U.S. were caused in part by genetics, though he said that "the extent of [genetic] impact is hard to determine."

On page 88 of his dissertation, Richwine included a section on "the growing Hispanic underclass." Heritage's paper takes the position that undocumented immigrants who are currently in the country would be a burden on the U.S. safety net and welfare programs if they were to be given citizenship.

An underclass, Richwine wrote, is "a socially isolated group of people for whom crime, welfare, labor force dropout, and illegitimacy are normal aspects of life." He argues that his data shows that "Hispanic immigrants come [to the U.S.] to work, but their children's labor force participation slips considerably."

"Superior performance on basic economic indicators is to be expected from later generations, who go to American schools, learn English, and become better acquainted with the culture," Richwine wrote in the dissertation. "Despite built-in advantages, too many Hispanic natives are not adhering to standards of behavior that separate middle and working class neighborhoods from the barrio."

"There can be little dispute that post 1965-immigration has brought a larger and increasingly visible Hispanic underclass to the United States, yet the underlying reasons for its existence cannot be understood without considering IQ," Richwine wrote.

Richwine's argument was that lower-IQ Hispanics are the ones who have come to the U.S., while Hispanics with higher IQs have remained in their countries of origin because they have better employment and financial prospects. The result is a situation in the U.S. where children of first-generation immigrants fall behind in U.S. schools and develop an anti-social attitude toward school work, he argued.

Lower-IQ individuals, Richwine also wrote, are more likely to accept government handouts.

"When given the choice between a paycheck from a low-paying job and a welfare check, most intelligent people would realize that the welfare check offers them no potential for advancement. Low-IQ people do not internalize that fact nearly as well," he wrote.

Richwine's full 166-page paper has not been posted online until now.

Read the full paper here:

IQ and Immigration Policy - Jason Richwine by HuffPost Politics

Mark Sanford South Carolina Victory Takes Him From 'Free Fall' To Rebirth

2013-05-07T21:19:21-04:00

WASHINGTON –- Americans, journalist David Halberstam once wrote, are "remarkably tolerant of error, particularly if it is self-confessed."

Mark Sanford is thanking his lucky stars that's the case. The former South Carolina governor won his old seat in Congress back on Tuesday, after voters in the state's coastal 1st Congressional District decided to overlook his many misadventures since he first admitted an extramarital affair in 2009.

Sanford, 52, a Republican, defeated Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a 58-year-old businesswoman best known nationally as comedian Stephen Colbert's older sister, in a special election to fill a seat vacated by former Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). Scott was appointed by the state's Republican governor to the U.S. Senate after Jim DeMint left his seat early to lead The Heritage Foundation, a D.C. think tank.

"It would be the most obvious of obviouses to say that I thought politics was forever over for me," Sanford told The Huffington Post in an interview last week. "But something happened that never happened in our state, which is, you know, a United States senator retired early. I mean that just doesn't happen in South Carolina."

Two weeks ago, Sanford was in "free fall," as he described it. His past indiscretions -– which played out in front of a national audience four years ago -– were dredged back up by news of trespassing complaints that had been lodged against him by his ex-wife, Jenny Sanford, for showing up at her home uninvited.

"I said to my guys at the time, 'Look, this thing's over with if people think that I'm the kind of guy that would go, you know, creeping through the hedge of my ex's house,'" Sanford said.

Sanford told the public that he was at the house to watch the Super Bowl with his youngest son, who is 14. But the national Republican Party quickly announced it would not spend money on Sanford's behalf, and a poll at the time showed Colbert Busch jumping out to a nine-point lead.

A national Democratic official in Washington on Tuesday said that the Public Policy Polling survey showing Colbert Busch up by such a large margin was "aberrant," and that the party's internal polls had always shown the race to be neck and neck.

After polls closed at 7 p.m., returns showed a close race for the first hour, but then Sanford began to pull away when numbers came in from Beaufort County, where there are large numbers of military families that live near a Marine air base and the Marines' Parris Island training depot. The Associated Press called the race for Sanford around 8:30 p.m., and with 100 percent of the vote in, he had won by nine percentage points, 77,251 votes to 64,413.

Democrats were eager to steal a congressional seat from Republicans in a deep-red state. This was a congressional district that voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney by an 18-point margin over President Barack Obama.

And even as the National Republican Congressional Committee sat on its hands, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee poured money and manpower into the Palmetto State. Sanford was outspent by an estimated four to one on the airwaves, and the DCCC had around 100 field staff or canvassers on the ground in the days before voters went to the polls.

The conventional wisdom until about a week ago was that Sanford was actually going to find a way to give the Democrats a congressional seat that was thought to be unloseable. Many thought that Colbert Busch would have a hard time holding on to the seat during the 2014 midterm elections, but Republicans who spoke with HuffPost in South Carolina were nonetheless nervous about losing it.

Yet over the past several days, a few things happened.

Colbert Busch became a focal point in the race in a way she had not been before. She had run a campaign that intentionally kept her public appearances to a minimum, hoping to keep the spotlight on Sanford and his ongoing gaffes as long as possible. This frustrated Sanford, and his campaign pushed hard on the notion that his opponent was hiding from the press and from tough questions.

Colbert Busch decided to go on a four-day bus tour over the last few days of the campaign, and as she did so, her positions on issues came under scrutiny. She had trouble answering questions about whether she supports President Barack Obama's health care law. Campaign contributions to her campaign from labor unions also became an issue, particularly since South Carolina is a right to work state and organized labor has tried to force Boeing to move a massive airplane factory that provided thousands of jobs out of the state.

Finally, in the campaign's last days, the focus was not entirely on Sanford.

"As this last week or so has gone by, finally there's begun to be a little bit of conversation about, 'Wait a minute, where is she on some of these issues?'" Sanford told HuffPost.

And as Sanford campaigned hard over the last week, national reporters who descended on the state saw repeatedly that while some voters viewed him unfavorably because of his past behavior, many were willing to overlook his missteps, especially if they shared his political views. And the increasing focus on Colbert Busch in the closing days only enhanced this dynamic, as Republicans were reminded of the political stakes.

Additionally, Sanford drew generally positive press attention for his unorthodox but genial embrace of conversation with any and all voters and his eagerness to take as many questions as possible from any reporter who wanted to talk.

During a 45-minute interview with HuffPost, he paused at the 35 minute-mark, when this reporter was getting ready to get up and end the conversation. Sanford didn't want to stop. "Any other questions for me?" he asked, expectantly.

He drove reporters' rental cars while they asked him questions, put this reporter on his cell phone with his oldest son, went on a search for a woman who didn't like him, with reporters in tow, and discussed how Buddhism had influenced his thinking. All of a sudden Sanford's stunt of several days earlier, where he debated a cardboard cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), looked less crazy and a little more clever.

The question now is whether Sanford's baggage will be a problem for his party nationally. Democrats certainly intend to try to make it one.

“The House Republican caucus has added yet another ethically challenged embarrassment who will be an albatross around the neck of every Republican forced to answer for Mark Sanford’s embarrassing and reckless behavior," said Alixandria Lapp, whose super PAC House Majority PAC supports Democrats and ran TV ads against Sanford.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called Sanford's victory "a clear win for the principles of limited government and freedom and a rejection of the Obama-Pelosi agenda of intrusive top-down government."

Sanford himself has said he is stronger for having lost his political career, only to see it reborn.

"I'm going to have scar tissue til the day I die that's affiliated with events of one chapter of my life," Sanford told HuffPost a few days ago. "And I'll go back to what a minister said in our church a couple of weeks ago which was, 'Do the events of your life refine or define your life?'

"And his point was, what the events of life ought to do is refine, that if you don't watch out, you can let an event define your life, and some people check out with alcohol or drugs or a gun, or whatever else and just say, 'I'm out of here,' or they give up on life or they give up on the dreams of life," he said.

Elizabeth Colbert Busch, Mark Sanford Race Down To The Wire In South Carolina

2013-05-04T18:48:49-04:00

BEAUFORT, S.C. -- It may have been a slip of the subconscious, or a phrase often used in small talk that sneaked out of the candidate's mind before she got a good look at it.

"I love this."

Wearing a bright orange overcoat that radiated positive vibes, Elizabeth Colbert Busch was standing in front of a short man looking at the handwritten sign he had taped to his chest.

"No South Carolina $ in Argentina!!" the sign said.

After telling him she loved it, Colbert Busch quickly moved on to shake another hand.

The sign was, of course, a reference to Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor who is Colbert Busch's opponent in Tuesday's special election to fill the coastal 1st District's congressional seat vacated by now-Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.).

This is without question one of the more unusual congressional races in recent history. Sanford, who disgraced himself in 2009 by disappearing for several days and then resurfacing to tell the nation he was having an extramarital affair with an Argentinian woman, has stayed in the headlines with a series of goofs and strange decisions. New disclosures about his behavior have dredged up his past, and he has tried to distract from those by staging attention-grabbing stunts, like debating a cutout of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Colbert Busch, meanwhile, is the older sister of comedian Stephen Colbert. She is an accomplished 58-year-old businesswoman with three children. This is her first time running for political office.

From a distance, the race resembles a spectacle. On the ground, however, it is (most of the time) just another political campaign, a winner-takes-all, loser-goes-home, scratch-and-claw battle to turn out voters.

Colbert Busch has largely avoided talking about Sanford's past, with the exception of this past week's debate, when she tore into Sanford, accusing him of using taxpayer dollars to carry on his tryst back in 2009, drawing gasps and hollers from the crowd. But largely, she has left that to others, including a Democratic super PAC that ran several TV ads aimed at her opponent's personal life.

In addition, she has limited her public appearances and stuck with a bland, fiscally focused message. Here in this idyllic small town near the U.S. Marines' Parris Island training base on Friday, it was no different. She sidestepped a question about whether character would be a deciding issue in the race: "Here's the difference. We have a very positive campaign," she said. "We're very optimistic. We know that our future is ahead of us and it's bright and it's good."

Despite the flavorless message, Colbert Busch delivers it with a friendly earnestness and an enthusiasm that makes up for its lack of substance. She is quite good on the stump. She is comfortable in her own skin, and carries herself with confidence. As she disembarked from her sleek campaign bus bearing the words, "Elizabeth Means Business," in big white letters on an blue background, she moved through the small crowd easily, oozing sincerity.

Perhaps as a result, Colbert Busch is in a position to win the congressional seat in the district that former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney won by 18 points last November, a seat that Sanford himself was elected to for three terms in a row before running for governor.

The race looks likely to go down to the wire. National Democrats, eager to embarrass the GOP in a red state, have poured money and resources into the race. If they can identify and mobilize enough Democrats, Colbert Busch will prevail. The national Republican Party, meanwhile, decided last month to abandon Sanford, announcing that it would not spend money on ads supporting his candidacy.

Sanford has been shaking hands and meeting voters largely by himself in the district, which stretches along the coast from Hilton Head past Charleston. On Thursday, he was in Bluffton, a small town 10 miles inland from Hilton Head, with what he called a little "bohemian" flavor. He wore a red, long-sleeved cotton Polo shirt, pleated khakis, and worn, brown leather boots, which he later told me were "goofy-looking." There was one staffer, a young woman, with Sanford, but he approached the crowd alone.

Sanford chatted easily with retirees and young families on vacation as they browsed through a farmers market, while an older man sang the blues on a small lawn nearby, sheltered from occasional rain by a small tent. Many of the people Sanford met were on vacation and from out of state. He moved quickly on from those conversations, but not without grace. It wasn't hard to spot the charm that just a few years ago made the 52-year-old a twice-elected governor with real prospects for the White House.

Despite his soap-opera life, or perhaps in part because of it, Sanford was greeted warmly by many of the people he met, and got disapproving glances from a few. A young pastor from Georgia with his wife and young daughter asked for a picture with Sanford. So did several others.

Another woman from Georgia asked, "Isn't that the guy who was on TV? For the girlfriend? I wouldn't vote for him."

But Debbie Morris, middle-aged and living in the district, said she had no problem supporting Sanford.

"I've been married 46 years. Men go through whatever it is they go through. The fact that he went through it and he happened to be a public servant at the time, it happens," said Morris, sitting with friends outside the Old Town Dispensary bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking out of a clear plastic cup.

"There's all different kinds of infidelity, not just sexual. I don't know what his relationship was with his wife and I don't want to know," Morris said. "Did he endanger the state of South Carolina? No."

Sanford has become optimistic that things are moving in his direction again. A poll that came out two weeks ago showed Sanford down 9 points, but more recent surveys indicate a dead heat, and Gov. Nikki Haley (R) endorsed Sanford this past week, along with the state's U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, both Republicans.

"I think it's going to be close, but I think he'll win," Graham said, calling Sanford's Pelosi cutout stunt a "smart" move that nationalized the race and got it away from a "personality contest."

Once Sanford had met just about everyone in sight at the farmers market, he sat down for what turned out to be a 45-minute conversation. He was desperate to get some of the attention in the race off of him and on to Colbert Busch, he said.

"The whole month goes by, the closest thing that I have as a campaign is a cardboard cutout of Pelosi because she was the only person debating me," Sanford said, referring to Pelosi's support for the super PAC behind the TV ads attacking Sanford's personal life.

"You couldn't have a debate with the candidate herself and so you're like, in desperation, saying, 'I'm going to at least debate the person who put $375,000 into my opponent's airwaves.'"

"I've never had that before," he said, exasperated.

Following his April 2 victory in the GOP primary, Sanford was knocked backwards when court documents were leaked to the press showing that Sanford's ex-wife, Jenny Sanford, had filed trespassing complaints against Sanford alleging that he had routinely violated the terms of their divorce order by showing up at her home uninvited. He said the fuss was over a trip to the house to watch the Super Bowl with the youngest of his four sons, Blake, 14, who was by himself.

"I think that [voters] had largely moved past my personal life at the end of the runoff, because I would have never won that runoff if that was still the focus," Sanford said. "I think that the whole trespassing, October surprise thing brought that all back into the forefront."

Then it came out that the first time Sanford's 17-year-old son, Bolton, had ever met his mistress-turned-fiancée, Maria Belen Chapur, was at his victory party after the primary. The boy's discomfort was evident in a photograph widely published in the press.

When asked if he was damaging the most important relationships in his life by running, Sanford asked to go off the record. When reminded that his son's apparent embarrassment had been a public affair, he reached for his back pocket.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said. Sanford pulled out his phone and dialed a number. The line on the other end rang for several seconds, until someone picked up.

"Hey, you have a second?" Sanford said. "What's that? Uh, I am right now at a table in Bluffton, South Carolina, with a reporter with The Huffington Post. He seems like a decent human being. We don't really know each other. He may be getting ready to blister me. I'm not sure. But he asked me a fairly probing question, um, not all of which I can answer based on, I think, on the importance of keeping family things inside the family, and keeping public things within the public realm. He nonetheless pressed, and I just would ask you … to boil the question down … just as a human being and as a dad, how I've done, and whether there's respect or not for me as a dad. I'm going to hand it over to the reporter."

He handed the phone to me. "It's Marshall," he said.

Marshall, a 20-year-old college student and the oldest of Sanford's four sons, was studying for exams. He seemed mildly irritated, but when I asked him how much of his father's question he was comfortable answering, he spoke convincingly of how he loves his dad and respects him. While there are ups and downs, he said, he thinks Sanford is a great dad.

"I've never doubted my dad's love for me," Marshall Sanford said.

The phone back in his hand, Mark Sanford said to him, "I don't know if it was good or bad, but anyway I appreciate whatever it was and I love you."

Then he got off the phone.

"Here's the larger conundrum of the exploration of one's personal life within the public sphere, which is, there's always a second half, or a second side, or another part to the story. I've never chosen to tell my story," he said. "I would love to present the other side of the case … There is a pattern here … I get it. There's still pain and hurt."

"If you were to know the full story -- well, never mind. I'd just say that life is at times more complex than meets the eye," he said.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story misidentified Elizabeth Colbert Busch's relationship to Stephen Colbert. She is his older sister.

Ted Cruz Tells South Carolina Republicans To Protect Constitution, Text Him Their Number

2013-05-03T23:09:40-04:00

COLUMBIA, S.C. -– In the space of a few minutes here Friday night, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) went from talking about constitutional amendments to asking for people to send him text messages.

That's what talk of a presidential run will do to a politician when he comes to an early primary state.

Cruz, a 42-year old freshman senator from Texas, did all the things that a politician interested in making a foray into the 2016 presidential lottery would do, name-checking each of the Republican politicians holding statewide office, telling jokes, and trying to collect contact information for potential grassroots supporters by asking them to text "growth" to a five-digit number. Those who did so got a message from Cruz's political action committee, the Jobs, Growth & Freedom Fund, with a link to its website.

Cruz, who spoke earlier in the day at the National Rifle Association's annual convention in Houston, was the headline speaker at an annual Republican event, the Silver Elephant Dinner, that was held this year in honor of former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who last year vacated his seat early to take the reins of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Yet the tension between Cruz and others in his party was on display, even here at a celebratory dinner where drinks flowed freely from the open bar. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the Palmetto State's senior senator, had sparing praise for Cruz during his speech from the stage, calling him "one of the smartest guys in the new class." But in an interview afterwards, Graham, though smiling and in a good mood, was frank in his assessment of the newly minted senator.

"I don't know what Ted's ambitions are. I think he's got a lot of talent. But the first thing he's got to prove to the country, and to people in Texas, is that he can, you know, throw a punch and also solve a problem," Graham told The Huffington Post. "Throwing a punch is important in politics. But you also gotta show that you can solve a problem.

"And I know he can throw a punch," Graham said. "I think he has the potential to solve hard problems. But time will tell."

Cruz's nearly 30-minute speech was built around what Republicans should do to protect the Constitution.

"We should be defending the Fourth and Fifth Amendments against an administration that recognizes no limits on its powers," Cruz said, referring to the amendments that protect against unlawful search and seizure by the government and that guarantee due process under the law. "Our freedom is in jeopardy in this country."

He boasted of standing up to members of the Obama administration, telling the story of his questioning Attorney General Eric Holder over the government's drone policy.

And he played prognosticator, predicting that the GOP will find its way back from the political wilderness where it finds itself after Mitt Romney's loss to President Barack Obama in last year's presidential election.

"A lot of Republicans are demoralized about November 2012," Cruz said, but then compared the current moment to 2005, when President George W. Bush had won a second term and Republicans controlled Congress, only to see Democrats retake the House and Senate in 2006 and the White House in 2008.

"Things can change quickly," Cruz said, and predicted a Republican takeover of the Senate in 2014. "I believe change will come quickly."

Cruz was just elected to Washington in November. But the son of Cuban immigrants and Harvard Law School graduate has shot to stardom -– with some in his party -– because of his willingness to challenge the status quo both in Washington and inside the GOP. He has not waited to be given responsibility and recognition from Senate leaders or his own party elders. Rather, Cruz has seized the spotlight by engaging in high-profile clashes with other senators. Cruz's staff has even taken on one of the top Republicans in the opposite chamber, the House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

The list of Cruz's confrontations in just a few months is already lengthy. During Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's confirmation hearing process, Cruz questioned whether the former Nebraska senator, a Republican, had received donations from terrorist groups, drawing a public rebuke from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who later told The Huffington Post that Cruz was a "wackobird" (McCain later apologized). But Cruz has taken pleasure in recriminations from fellow Republicans, telling activists gleefully that they shouted at him over his opposition to gun control legislation.

Cruz has begun to speak more forcefully against the immigration reform bill in the Senate, positioning himself as a more conservative version of a Latino Republican than Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is championing the bill. Perhaps the most audacious fight with other Republicans was at the staff level, when Cruz's chief of staff led an effort to sabotage a bill being promoted by Cantor in the House to create state-based high-risk insurance pools using money from Obamacare that the GOP said was otherwise going to be put in a slush fund.

Cruz has also used his spot on the prestigious Judiciary Committee to tangle with just about every cabinet member who has appeared in front of the body, most notably Holder and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. Cruz on Friday night regaled the audience with the tale of his back-and-forth with Holder over whether the U.S. government has the authority to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil if they are not posing an imminent, immediate threat.

"I took the opportunity to ask the attorney general a few gentle questions," Cruz said. "I really thought in a minute he was going to say to me, 'I do not understand this Constitution to which you're referring.'"

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has chastised Cruz more than once, snapping at him for what she said was a lecture on the Constitution. She and others, including New York Times columnist David Brooks, have compared Cruz to former Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who defamed people by accusing them of communist activities in the 1950s.

Cruz has intense support from many in the conservative grassroots, in contrast to the way that the establishment GOP has looked at Cruz skeptically and even with hostility. The recent talk of Cruz as a potential 2016 candidate for president has been greeted with amusement by insiders from both parties in Washington. But there is no doubt that at the moment, Cruz has tapped into the rawest of emotions among the conservative base, which continues to applaud and reward those who most stridently and loudly oppose Obama.

One South Carolina Republican operative, however, said that Cruz does not yet have a political operation to speak of in the Palmetto State, which goes third in the primary process.

Cruz "has a few friends here," said the Republican, who asked to be anonymous. "Rubio has a whole network of people here already. [Sen.] Rand Paul [R-Ky.] has a decent network as well."

Of course, it's a long way from 2016. And if Cruz has any intention of building toward a 2016 run, Friday night gave him a start.

"We do expect you back in the state quite a bit," said state party chairman Chad Connelly.

Stephanie Cutter Starts Consulting Firm With 2 Former Obama Aides

2013-05-02T05:00:00-04:00

WASHINGTON -- Three former top campaign aides to President Barack Obama are starting consulting firm, continuing an ongoing trend of former Obama staffers entering the private sector to rake in large consulting fees.

Stephanie Cutter and Jen O'Malley Dillon, both deputy campaign managers on Obama's reelection campaign, and Teddy Goff, the 2012 digital director, are forming Precision Strategies, based in Washington and New York, they announced Thursday.

Jenni LeCompte, currently an assistant secretary of the treasury for public affairs, will also work for the firm, as will three other former Obama campaign staffers: Frank Benenati, Julia Prieto and Lucy Silver.

Cutter, 44, is a veteran Democrat communicator who has worked for former President Bill Clinton, former Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass), John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, the 2008 Obama campaign, and then was a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and then to the president himself before moving to the 2012 reelection campaign, where she became one of its most prominent public faces.

Cutter has been known for her tireless, aggressive style -- one of her nicknames is Box Cutter. She was often the one making the president's case in Web videos designed to push back on specific charges from Republican Mitt Romney, and she drew attention when she intimated Romney may have committed a felony by misrepresenting his role at private equity firm Bain Capital to federal regulators.

O'Malley Dillon, 36, worked for Obama's 2008 campaign as battleground states director, and then went to the Democratic National Committee to help run Organizing for America, in an effort to keep the 13 million people on the campaign's e-mail list engaged. Much of her work at the DNC, she told The New York Times, "was building the foundation for the re-elect." There were a lot of things that were under the radar: the analytics work, building on our internal polling, honing our 50-state strategy.” In her role on the 2012 campaign, she focused on managing voter contact programs.

Goff, 28, is another 2008 campaign alumnus who in 2012 became a prominent name, especially after the election ended and his senior role in the digital effort made him a focus for those in the press trying to figure out why and how Obama outpaced Romney so dramatically in Web, data, and technology. Goff helped build Obama's Web and social media presence, integrate its massive data operation and digital tools, and hone its online fundraising. Goff managed more than 200 people, and his team raised almost $700 million in online donations and registered around 1 million voters online. Between the 2008 and 2012 elections, Goff was a senior manager at Blue State Digital.

Since the election, most of the top staffers on the Obama campaign, as well as some who stayed at the White House after the 2008 campaign, have struck out on their own in the private sector, leading The New Republic to mock them as idealists turned cronies in a piece with the subtitle, "How to Make Millions Off Obama."

The list of Obamaites who have struck out on their own includes:

Jim Messina, the 2012 campaign manger, who has launched The Messina Group.

Jeremy Bird, Obama's national field director, and Mitch Stewart, former battleground states director, have founded 270 Strategies.

Robert Gibbs, Obama's first White House press secretary, and Ben LaBolt, the 2012 campaign's national press secretary, are in the process of launching as an yet unnamed firm.

Jon Favreau, Obama's White House speechwriter, and Tommy Vietor, former National Security Council spokesman, have started Fenway Strategies.

This doesn't include two of the most senior former Obama advisers, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, who are at this point brands unto themselves and will do consulting as individuals in addition to getting paid five- and six-figure sums to give speeches.

Mitch McConnell Reelection Campaign Hoping To Close Data Gap By Bringing In New Blood

2013-04-29T13:02:08-04:00

WASHINGTON –- Mitch McConnell does not seem like an obvious choice to help lead the GOP out of the digital wilderness it has found itself in when it comes to political campaigns.

The Senate minority leader most often emerges into the public eye from the floor of the Senate, formally debating Democrats in the chamber or dryly answering (or completely ignoring) reporter questions in the halls. Flashy he is not.

Yet McConnell's aides have noticed that the Republican conversation about catching up to Obama's data-driven, clinic of a campaign in 2012 is mostly focused on doing so by 2016. That doesn't help McConnell, who is up for reelection in 2014.

And so the attitude among aides to the fifth-term Kentucky Republican is that while some in the GOP are holding soul-searching panel discussions and others are fighting over who gets to control the data and the money in 2016, they're going to run a cutting-edge, digital-savvy campaign in 2014 that shows their party how it's done.

"We have no doubt the GOP will be ready for the 2016 presidential cycle, but in the meantime, we plan to set the standard here in our campaign and establish best practices other conservatives can emulate," said Jesse Benton, McConnell's campaign manager.

McConnell may not have a Democratic opponent yet; he has so far managed to intimidate a long list of Democrats from taking him on, all while avoiding a primary challenge from his right flank. But McConnell has struggled with a low approval rating. Some polls have shown him as low as 36 percent, though his aides point to other surveys showing him closer to 50 percent. And the fact that he is running a full-throttle reelection campaign is a sign to some that he knows he remains vulnerable.

So McConnell is bringing some relatively new blood into an establishment campaign. He has hired a small firm called Crowdverb to run his campaign's data operation. For digital strategy, McConnell is turning to Vincent Harris, a 24-year-old digital specialist who worked for Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-Texas) campaign and on the presidential primary runs of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga).

Throw in Benton, the 35-year-old former campaign manager for former Rep. Ron Paul's (R-Texas) 2012 presidential campaign, and the message is clear: McConnell may be 71-years-old and look the part of a local chamber of commerce president, but he is taking an approach to personnel that embraces outsiders and innovation.

Crowdverb's co-founder, Cyrus Krohn, is someone who has been "largely ignored in Republican circles," Benton said. The 42-year-old Krohn is of the tech world, not of the GOP political establishment, said Josh Holmes, the 34-year-old McConnell adviser who runs the senator's district office in Washington and was Krohn's connection to McConnell.

Krohn, who is based in Seattle like Crowdverb co-founder Todd Herman, has done some work for the Republican party, in a two-year stint as digital director at the Republican National Committee during the 2008 election. But he fell victim at the RNC to "myth of the savior" thinking, one senior Republican digital strategist told The Huffington Post on background. The RNC, led by then-chairman Mike Duncan, expected Krohn to "work magic" but did not give him the resources or the authority to do so, the strategist said.

Krohn spent a few years at CNN in the early '90s before helping to start Slate Magazine, where he eventually became publisher. All told, he spent a decade at Slate, and then from 2004 to 2007 Krohn worked for Microsoft and Yahoo in the world of online video, primarily in politics.

"One of the things that has bothered me most about the political industry is that everyone knows how to talk a good game but very few do anything remarkable or unique. Nowhere is that more prevalent than the world of data and online strategy," Holmes, the McConnell adviser, told The Huffington Post in an e-mail. "Most of the people selling data-based products or online strategy to the political world are from the political world, which immediately disqualifies them in my view. I wouldn't hire an accountant to be our press secretary so why would we hire a political strategist to handle our data?"

"I spent about a year talking to a lot of vendors. Very few of them invented the technology, wrote code, understood data analytics, or applied algorithms. Most of them know politics and they have a widget to sell," Holmes said. "[Krohn] and his team invent technology, write code, understand analytics, create algorithms, and build usable dashboards. They don't write ad copy and they don't even seem to have an opinion on the political application of their findings. When you're up in the air it's really comforting to know that the guy flying the plane is a pilot."

Crowdverb is harvesting massive amounts of data from publicly available information on the web, in cooperation with its partner BehaviorMatrix, and using it to enhance the McConnell campaign's voter file, to measure public sentiment about McConnell moment by moment and to track how its different messages and tactics are impacting persuadable voters.

"What we're focused on really is the inherent need for dynamic data to complement traditional campaign tactics," Krohn said. "What can you glean from the live web to understand in real time, based on people's emotions, to get them to take an action on the campaign's behalf: opening an e-mail, making a donation."

Krohn gave an example.

"Let's say it's a Sunday talk show in Kentucky and it's a call-in program. All of the audio from that program is digitized for closed captioning. We're able to score what was said, gauge how it played with the electorate, and then determine what the implications were in terms of how people perceived that content via broadcast, and then respond," he said.

Crowdverb measures the response, in part, by "maintaining records of individuals who have publicly available profiles, and mapping that back to the voter database."

"We can say, 'We've identified that the comments from this program affected people emotionally in these ways' through predictive modeling as well as actual commentary, and that informs geographically how to communicate with them," Krohn said.

Benton said the campaign has "about 41 percent of voter file matched to what they consider a detailed online profile," which includes "things like social media handles, mobile phone number, preferred method of internet browsing, general internet activity, how people prefer to use social networks, and then also certain behavioral things or sentiment things about issues."

He continued, "This is what the Obama machine did."

That may be a stretch. The Obama campaign, according to Sasha Issenberg's reporting, began the 2012 election "confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House," and then worked to identify more potential supporters and recruited them one by one with individualized outreach.

If McConnell has 40 percent of the voter file identified, they may be on their way to doing some of what Obama did.

Benton explained how the real time feedback from Crowdverb will help the McConnell campaign monitor how the electorate is moving, and will then inform how to respond.

"Because the boss is always getting attacked, we're seeing a little bit more cycnicism about the boss than we'd like to see. They show us what they think is a critical level of cynicism that would start to hurt, and at this point in time we are below that," Benton said. "But if we start to see a cynicism indices indicate a rise and that would tell us there could be a problem there, we would try to encourage our netroots people to make phone from home calls to people where their cynicism indexes are rising … with a sincerity message."

That element of engaging grassroots supporters to influence their friends was a key component of the Obama campaign ground game.

Harris' job in running the campaign's digital strategy is not so much the harvesting and organizing of data as it is the promotion of the candidate through new media.

"Usually campaigns have a communications plan centered only on traditional media but Team McConnell believes in the emerging Buzzfeed culture: memes, web videos, and persuasion by entertainment," Harris said. "They understand that when given a choice, many people would prefer to look at cat photos than engage with their elected officials. So we're working hard to ensure the senator's message breaks through what has become a cluttered medium."

The McConnell team was eager to talk about their burgeoning digital operation, in an obvious attempt to project strength to potential opponents and hopefully keep the field clear as long as possible. Yet, it's not a bluff. McConnell, as always, is playing for keeps.

Push To Boost George W. Bush's Legacy Faces Resistance From The Right

2013-04-24T17:31:45-04:00

WASHINGTON -- George W. Bush may feel "no need to defend" himself this week before the opening of his presidential library on Thursday, but that's not true for many of those who served in his administration.

Bush loyalists have been working for weeks, if not months, on a communications plan to maximize the positive impact this week on the legacy of their former boss, the 43rd president.

"We know there will be a lot of attacks waged by the left, but there's also an opportunity here for those of us who served to set the record straight on some things and get some facts out there that the president has chosen not to do, to his credit," Ed Gillespie, a former White House adviser to Bush, told The Huffington Post.

But as people from Bush's world have mobilized to carry their banner forward, they have been met with resistance not just from the left, but also from those who are politically aligned with them or who are sympathetic to their point of view, yet think that promoting Bush's record harms the GOP.

Leading the counter charge has been a policy expert who is not a Republican, but who did support the Iraq War: Walter Russell Mead, a Yale professor, foreign policy intellectual and prodigious blogger.

"The American public largely believes that Bush failed, and no matter how many blog posts ex-Bush officials write, that isn’t going to change anytime soon," Mead wrote on his blog, Via Meadia.

"There are lots of intelligent people out there who think this is a gross injustice, and want the national conversation to focus on setting the record straight," Mead wrote. "For its own sake the Republican Party has to deafen itself to their piteous pleas; they are sirens luring the sailors to their destruction on the rocks."

Mead's argument drew an angry response from former Bush adviser Peter Wehner, who called it a "shallow and misleading attack." Wehner litigated a number of policy points, provoking Mead into an equally biting riposte. Another former Bush administration official, Will Inboden, steered clear of the vitriol and offered a thoughtful and persuasive argument that Mead overlooked several significant Bush successes and perpetuated a "caricature."

The pushback from Wehner and Inboden, as well as from another former Bushie, Peter Feaver, did expose some holes in Mead's assessment of the Bush presidency. But even if Mead overlooked some of the things Bush did well, he was making a broader point. Criticism of the Bush presidency, Mead argued, can't be greeted with bugle calls to mount the ramparts and launch a counterattack. Rather, the Republican Party must put most of its effort into thinking deeply and explaining how its policies are going to achieve different results than what the nation saw under Bush: namely, two wars that went badly for a very long time and an economic collapse.

Many on the right have concluded that Bush lost the GOP advantage on spending by not doing more to restrain it, and that he lost the party's foreign policy advantage with his misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush supporters believe the advantage can be regained by disputing the critiques and pointing out where Bush was successful, and that's what they're doing this week. The Mead camp thinks this is a fool's errand, because the Bush brand is still too badly damaged to gain a hearing from most Americans.

"Bush may be impressed by the devotion that so many partisans still show to his failed tenure, but no one else is, and it undermines the credibility of everything that Bush’s loyalists have to say," wrote Daniel Larison, a senior editor at The American Conservative, a conservative magazine founded in 2002 in opposition to the Iraq War. "The fact that these loyalists refuse to take friendly and constructive criticism from someone who is mostly sympathetic to Bush just makes Mead’s point for him."

In other words, squabbling over how much blame Bush should get for what went wrong during his presidency is a wasted exercise, the Mead camp argues, at a time when the GOP needs to move quickly to make up lost ground.

"Whatever you blame it on, the Republican Party is viewed as being out of step with a significant number of people," conservative writer Ben Domenech said in a debate with Wehner at Furman University last week.

Domenech wrote a few days later that Bush's legacy "is of a lighter tax burden, a safer country, and a destroyed Republican Party."

Erick Erickson, who runs RedState.com, sided with Mead and Domenech.

"Until the GOP is willing to say that maybe, just maybe, TARP, No Child Left Behind, 'Big Government conservatism,' Medicare Part D, the Genera Motors bailout, the handling of Katrina, etc. etc. etc. are not worth defending the GOP cannot move on," Erickson wrote on Tuesday. "But to move on from those, the GOP must first move on from those who brought us those things. It’s never easy asking friends, colleagues, and consultants to go sit on the sidelines. But the GOP must."

Bush supporters working this week on the former president's image are not willing to throw their leader under the bus.

"He commands a great deal of loyalty, obviously," Gillespie told HuffPost. "There's a great deal of personal loyalty and affection for him. I tell people after a little over 18 months by his side, 20 months I guess it was, I felt like I was a better person for knowing him. That's how a lot of us feel."

And in fact, there is some evidence to support the notion that the time is ripe to push for a reappraisal of Bush. His approval rating has improved from 33 percent to 47 percent from January 2009 to present day, while his disapproval rating has declined from 66 percent to 50 percent, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released this week. Yet the Iraq War remains a millstone, with only 40 percent approving of his decision and 57 percent disapproving, though that is up from a low of 28 percent approving and 70 percent disapproving in December 2006, before the surge.

It's likely that in the long term, Bush's presidency and the Iraq War will be judged more circumspectly by scholars and historians. Feaver pointed to a recent lecture by University of Virginia history professor Melvyn Leffler, in which he called for a more nuanced examination of why Bush invaded Iraq.

The conventional wisdom, Leffler said, is that "out of a sense of overweening power and moral hubris the Bush administration unnecessarily went to war and made things infinitely worse for the United States and for Iraq."

"I'm trying to complicate this interpretation, not rebut it," Leffler said. "I do think that moral hubris and a sense of overweening power motivated the decision, but there were other critical factors as well: fear, threat perception, guilt about 9/11 having taken place, a sense of responsibility to prevent another attack, a complicated web of domestic political calculations, preoccupation with credibility."

Bush himself is devoting energy in his post-office life to an initiative he started while in office, helping to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and cervical cancer in Africa. That part of his legacy will likely improve his reputation over the coming years, as the contentious argument over Bush's foreign policy and spending record continues to play out.

Feaver argued that there doesn't need to be tension between advancing the GOP's political fortunes and defending Bush's presidency.

"I am confident that ... a rigorous analysis of the past will produce a more balanced assessment than the conventional wisdom holds," he said. "And I am confident that such rigor and balance will be more useful to Republicans going forward than caricature is."