Pat Caddell a "Liberal Democrat?" No He's Not!

I've been thinking about political operative Pat Caddell for years, but haven't written about him because I figured that anyone interested enough to care about the subject must know that Pat Caddell is quite conservative--and rarely disagrees with cable pundits such as Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck. I've watched Caddell, a contributor to Fox News, on so many panels, supposedly there to represent the liberal view and spar with the conservative---but instead he agrees with the conservative almost all the time.

I was prompted to write this afternoon when I read Peter Nicholas on the Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp." Nicholas quotes a Democratic consultant who received a "blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel..." This person, unnamed because he/she fears that Obama's people will retaliate by hitting him where it hurts--in the wallet--said that the tone of the call was "intimidating." He told Nicolas that there was an "implicit suggestion," (Nicholas's words) that, in the consultant's words, "Clients might stop using you if you continue."

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn denied that anyone from the White House was making any such threat.

Nicholas then quotes Pat Caddell, now 59, who came into the public eye as pollster for Jimmy Carter--while still at Harvard, he polled for George McGovern--and over the years has been sharply critical of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and other establishment Democrats. Caddell told Nicholas that he had talked to Democratic consultants who had confirmed the threats but, no surprise to me, Caddell declined to give their names.

Some research turns up the following:

--On August 24, 2009 on Glenn Beck's show, Caddell described himself as a "liberal Democrat." and then bashed the Obama administration's economic policies, Attorney General Eric Holder, etc. He asked if President Obama is "disingenuous," called the democratic party under Obama both "elitist" and "revolutionary," brought up the names of George Soros and Rahm Emanuel, and agreed with Beck about the evilness of Obama's soon-to-be-former green jobs czar Van Jones

--On August 13 on Glenn Beck's show with Karl Rove and Andrew Napolitano, Caddell took off after Rahm Emauel: .

CADDELL: He leaves the Clinton White House and he gets two jobs. He gets put on the board of Freddie Mac, which is the second of the big giant mortgage companies.

BECK: What is his -- what is his qualification? Didn't he go to school for dancing?

CADDELL: He studied ballet dancing in college. He was trained for ballet. He is.

BECK: Freddie Mac doesn't do ballet.

CADDELL: No, that's true.

BECK: Yes.

CADDELL: Now, he gets. The other job he has is that he gets a job with Wasserstein Perella, which is a major Wall Street deal company, and he gets in their Chicago office. And he then made $16 million in less than two years.

BECK: In two years?

CADDELL: Yes.

BECK: Two years, $16 million is what he makes.

CADDELL: On top of the quarter million taxpayers gave him for Freddie Mac.

BECK: And $250,000. Wait, he was there when -- he was there.

CADDELL: He was there when they're cooking the books.

BECK: Yes. He was there.

CADDELL: This is -- they were cooking the books there.

BECK: Got it. OK. Sixteen million dollars -- how did he make the $16 million?

CADDELL: Paid $16 million basically on one large deal and there's a second one. But a big deal he got it on was he was advising SBC which later grew into the new AT&T.

BECK: OK, SBC.

CADDELL: Right.

BECK: That's not really -- here's what's interesting about the SBC thing, is, the guy who helped make this deal.

CADDELL: Yes.

BECK: . took a loss, did he not?

CADDELL: Yes. They had to sell because they bought another phone company, Ameritech. They had to get rid of a security company called SecurityLink. It was $1 billion, $1, $1.5 billion investment. He sold it to a group headed by -- an investment group being led by.

BECK: Whitacre?

CADDELL: No, by -- this Whitacre was the chairman. He sold it to a group led by Mr. Emanuel for about $500 million.

BECK: OK.

CADDELL: Six months later -- six months later, the investment bank that bought it sold it for $1 billion.

....CADDELL: Now, and he took out a huge amount of money. Now, the president at that time, Whitacre was the chairman of SBC.

BECK: America, does the name Whitacre, the guy who helped Rahm Emanuel
make $16 million, does the name Whitacre ring a bell? Pat?

CADDELL: Because, when they appointed the new chairman of G.M., who announced the day of his appointment, I know nothing about the car business, his name was Edward Whitacre.

BECK: Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness! It's the new chairman of G.M. that knows.

CADDELL: Well, it gets better. It gets better, because the second name down in the corner, Bill Daley, brother of the mayor, who is the really, the powerful force. I said this on the air in 2008, a person pulling the strings in the Obama campaign was Bill Daley. One of his closest friends, one of his closest confidantes is a person named Jim Johnson. Jim Johnson was the chairman of Fannie Mae. He had been -- his qualifications for the largest mortgage company in the world was that he had been Walter Mondale's campaign manager.

BECK: Oh.

CADDELL: And he puts him on the board there.

....CADDELL: It is a -- it is a cancer on the society. No one will touch this story. Nobody has made this connection in the media, well, because they have decided they have a new role, which is to serve as lackeys.

....BECK: They are in deep trouble. And you bring any connections, you keep helping us and I will air the story to my last breath.

CADDELL: There is so much to uncover here. It is like the beginning.

BECK: You stay close to us, sir, and we will uncover it.

CADDELL: Will do.

--August 12, 2009, Cadell appeared on Sean Hannity's "Great American Panel" along with Ann Coulter--Coulter and Caddell are friends-- and Mercedes Vianna Schlapp who worked in George W. Bush's White House.

HANNITY (to Caddelll): I'll start with you as a Democrat on this panel. Are you happy with the names the Democratic Party, the DNC, the attacks against the American people that we've been witnessing at these town halls?

CADDELL: Let me just say, you know, as a Democrat, we're supposed to be the party of the common people. I've never known a situation where the president -- remember the DNC is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the White House.

HANNITY: You don't deserve to call yourself a Democrat, because you're making too much sense. I mean...

When he was polling for Jimmy Carter, Caddell, then 29, was the impetus behind Carter's disastrous "malaise speech." (As explained in a new book on the subject, What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President, the speech, delivered from the Oval Office on July 15, 1979, temporarily boosted Carter's ratings, but only temporarily.) In retrospect, says the book's author Kevin Mattson, unfairly, the speech came to be seen as one of many disasters of the Carter President--and a factor in his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Perhaps Caddell, who went on to consult for the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Gary Hart, and Joe Biden has been a double agent all along.

I'm not the first to point out Caddell's politics. Many came before me, but none that I've noticed lately. In late 2000, lefty turned righty David Horowitz, praised Caddell: "Pat Caddell is a Democrat with a Conscience. Is there another?"

 

Comments

[MuchMadness]

This is not surprising. Fox News has lots and lots of money, and there are lots of Democrats who are willing to sell their political souls for big bucks.

[mdey]

Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are not liberals or democrats. They spend all of their time on Hannity' s and Beck's shows attacking liberals and democrats.

[wizened]

fox news increasingly becomes a caricature of itself and will appeal to a narrow and narrower audience unless it shows more balance. Great post Carol. Its interesting to see the subtle ways in which news outlet canmanipulate opinion and why it is necessary to rely on multiple sources of information.

[MajorKong]

It's pretty typical of the media to "balance" a far-right guest with a moderate. The end result is the middle getting dragged farther and farther to the right.

[ohmetoo]

Thank you for pointing this tactic out. It hadn't occurred to me but makes perfect sense.

[drumz]

X2

[victorvelasco]

Yeah, sure, Caddell is a ...liberal­....Democr­at...and my name is Beyonce, pleased to meet you.

[SEQUOIABISON]

Carol I completely agree with you, Pat Caddell is much closer to Rush Limbaughs political philosophy and does not resemble the liberal point of view in any way whatsoever.

[24hourrifle]

fox is scared to death of actual progressiv­es/liberal­s...
cadell,doug schoen,peter johnson jr,kirsten powers,and the great juan williams,of course,who they all use as a sort of shield against the hypocritical foolishness they deal in.
they can always count on williams to defend rush limbaugh,or any other conserv. who says/does something stupid.

even bob beckel is pretty weak.i like beckel,ane he does try.but he just never seems to have the facts.he's obviously such good friends w/hannity that he never fights hard enough...he always ends up getting shouted down by hannity and the other two cons.on the panel.

mara liasson?nina easton?these are the fnc idea of liberals.

and of course the late great alan colmes,who managed to somehow spend ten years being completely irrelevant on a show which features his own name in the title.

anyone to the left of any of these "liberals", is immediately described and dismissed as "radical" or "leftwing loon".

[Carol Felsenthal - Huffpost Blogger]

Yes, Doug Schoen seems a not-so-closeted conservative in his appearances on Fox News shows.

My sense of Juan Williams is that he's become lately a stronger liberal voice. I think he likes Hannity personally. Hannity is, by the way, a likable man. (I did his show when my book on Bill Clinton's post presidency was published.) Hannity was friendly and his questions were fair more fair than those of Alan Colmes, who accused me falsely of giving money to Obama. (I'm a journalist so i don't work for or contribute to any candidate.) I suppose Colmes must have been paid well or else he would have been too humiliated to get up every morning and go to work. )

I find Bob Beckel to be a feisty liberal voice.

Great reply; you obviously know a lot about the subject.

[Carol Felsenthal - Huffpost Blogger]

Oh, forgot to mention, the White House lunch on Friday, November 12 for journalists included a name hourrifle mentioned: Mara Liasson

According to Politico, "the attendees for Friday’s lunch were as follows: CNN's David Gergen, Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, Newsweek's Jon Meacham and Howard Fineman, the Atlanta Journal-Co­nstitution­'s Cynthia Tucker, POLITICO's Mike Allen, NPR/ Fox's Mara Liasson, Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall and New York Times trio David Brooks, Andy Rosenthal, and Gail Collins."

[EscapeTireTube]

Liberal is not what it used to be. JFK was once considered a liberal, but now he would be a conservative.
"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Truly conservative words. Plus JFK was a hardcore anti communist. And he lowered taxes and understood that was the way to stimulate the economy and the way to encourage research and inventions. He was close with Sen. Joe McCarthy (RFK worked with him). Caddell has same beliefs but today's liberals have gone off the deep end.

[blizb]

When Obama asked us to return to community service which reflected those words of JFK he was called a Communist and host of other names by Republicans.

I think Bush was so far right and the right wing extremists have put the country in a state of fear in order to gain political advantage the liberal and progressive efforts to try to help our nation get back on track don't constitute being off the deep end.

Republicans support "trickle down" economics which didn't work, they supported both the Bush wars, they support deregulation and allowed the tax cuts for the rich who didn't reinvest in America by shipping jobs overseas with no regulations to stop them and they had Republican support.

While those are opinions and the right is entitled to their own, the hatred and racism from the right is closer to being off the deep end.

There is no way one person could be a Maoist, Communist, Fascist, Marxist, Nazi all at the same time. The right wing tea baggers have gone off the deep end because they use these terms not knowing what they mean with no Republican leadership to speak out against their hatred and ignorance.

The Republicans are using them for political advantage and I think that is off the deep end.

[MajorKong]

Eisenhower wanted to establish a Department of Peace, had a 92% top marginal tax rate and presided over a public works project the size of which Obama can only dream about.

Today they wouldn't let him anywhere near the Republican party.

Today's conservatives have gone off the deep end.

[EscapeTireTube]

No argument here. The Dems wanted Eisenhower to run as a Dem for President. He chose to be a Republican. The Conservatives wanted Taft.

[drumz]

Nice try. Kennedy was also very big on social programs so you can cherry pick something to fit your agenda, big deal.
Our economy does best when corporations are kept from overpaying their management - higher corporate taxes does that so they don't have the money to spend on outrageous salaries.

[trainunderwater]

It goes to show what a partisan nation we live in when Conservatives can't process that one can be liberal and still "have a conscience." I suppose it's also true the other way around as well.