The Campaign Spot

Lew: IRS Investigation Was on Inspector General Web Site in Fall 2012

By Jim Geraghty

May 17, 2013 4:29 PM

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4

AL HUNT, HOST, BLOOMBERG NEWS: We’re going to get to larger economic questions in a little bit, but first the IRS, which reports to Treasury. When were you first notified that IRS agents were targeting conservative groups like the Tea Party?

JACK LEW, TREASURY SECRETARY, U.S. GOVERNMENT: Al, I learned the substance of this report last Friday when it became a matter of public knowledge. Before that, in mid March, I had had a conversation, just a getting-to-know-you conversation, with the inspector general right after I started, and he went through a number of items that were matters they were working on. And the topic of a project on the 501c3 issue was one of the things he briefed me was ongoing.

I didn’t know any of the details of it until last Friday. When I learned about it — from the moment I learned about it, I was outraged. The Secretary of the Treasury, as a citizen, it is a matter of the highest priority that the IRS be beyond suspicion in terms of its (inaudible).

HUNT: Did Tim Geithner or Neal Wolin or the general counsel know about it before him?

LEW: I think that there was — the heads-up that I got was something that was a matter of public knowledge. It was posted on the IG’s website in the Fall of 2012. I believe that other is typically the practice that an inspector general notify the agencies when matters are opened. I was not aware of any details. My deputy was not aware of any details until it became a matter of public knowledge.

J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, today told members of the House Ways and Means Committee that he informed the Treasury’s general counsel of his audit on June 4, and deputy Treasury secretary Neal Wolin “shortly thereafter.”

While the inspector general’s report was still ongoing, anyone at the highest level of the Treasury Department could see that the IG had been investigating the topic for several months. And yet no one in the entire Treasury Department felt the president should be notified?

Tags: IRS , Jack Lew

IRS: 'Please Detail the Content of Your Members' Prayers.'

By Jim Geraghty

May 17, 2013 2:10 PM

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96

Today’s hearing on IRS abuses had a lot of “are you kidding me?” moments, but this one stands out:

“It would surprise me that that question was asked,” acting commissioner Steven Miller tells Representative Aaron Schock, Republican of Illinois.

UPDATE: Chris Moody at Yahoo has the IRS letter and responses that began this line of inquiry: “Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood, are considered educational as defined under 501(c)(3).”

Among the other questions the IRS posed to the Iowa Coalition for Life: “You stated that you sponsored a Forum on Stem Cells, End of Life Decisions and a possible forum on Contraception. Please describe in detail the information provided at each of these forums.”

Tags: IRS Abuses , Aaron Schock

Why Every American Can Understand the IRS Scandal

By Jim Geraghty

May 17, 2013 10:02 AM

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2

On a podcast with Andrew Malcolm of Investor’s Business Daily and Melissa Clouthier, they asked which scandal will prove most damaging to the Obama administration. I think it will be the IRS, even though it probably ought to be Benghazi, considering how lives were lost in that event.

Almost every American deals with the IRS. Even those who pay no net federal income taxes still have to fill out all of their forms in April. Almost everyone has heard some story about getting audited, and what a nightmarish process that is. I suspect most taxpayers feel like they filled out their tax forms right, but they’re not entirely sure, considering how ludicrously complicated the U.S. tax code is. I suspect everyone fears that someday there will be a knock at your door, and some guy who looks like Agent Smith from The Matrix will be there, demanding your financial records for the past ten years, and if anything is out of order, you’ll go to jail for the rest of your life.

So unlike Benghazi or the Department of Justice looking through the phone records of Associated Press reporters, everybody feels in their guts what the IRS scandal is about: a person with enormous power over you having an unjustified, arbitrary grudge against you, and abusing that authority.

The Internal Revenue Service has been a cultural villain for quite some time. Just ask Rockwell, back in the 1980s.

Tags: IRS , Barack Obama

A Spoonful of Sugar Won't Help Obamacare Go Down

By Jim Geraghty

May 17, 2013 9:40 AM

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4

Also in today’s Jolt, courtesy my brother: “Here we see Obama with Corporal Poppins.”

There’s some evidence that having the Marine hold the umbrella broke protocol.

Tags: Barack Obama

The 'Truther' Element That Sours 'Iron Man 3'

By Jim Geraghty

May 17, 2013 7:33 AM

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9

The final Morning Jolt of the week includes plenty of scandal roundup from this busy week, but I try to close out the week on lighter topics . . .

A Spoiler-Filled Assessment of the Latest ‘Iron Man’ Sequel

It’s late enough for a spoiler-filled look at Iron Man 3, right?

‘Iron Man 3’ is a wildly uneven movie. When it works, it really works; when it doesn’t work, it falls flat on its iron faceplate.

The first part that I liked, and thought was a strong screenwriting decision, was the choice to have Tony Stark suffering from panic and anxiety attacks because of his near-death experience in “The Avengers.”

A couple of recent movies and television shows have irked me recently when their characters go through major, dramatic, often life-threatening or certainly outlook-altering events . . . and then return just fine afterwards. I can hear it now: “Come on, Jim, that’s just the magic of the movies,” but plot holes and slipshod characterization aren’t actually what’s supposed to be “magic” about the movies. If a character goes through an experience that should be consequential and significant, then we need some signs that it actually was consequential and significant. If the actions of the characters have no real consequence, why should the audience get involved in the show?

I can believe, for the sake of the story, that aliens exist, that superheroes exist, robots, magic, whatever you want — so long as the fictional universe I’m seeing has a certain internal consistency to the whole thing. A recent example of the writers botching this came a few months ago on “Castle,” when the protagonist’s daughter was kidnapped, taken overseas, her life threatened . . . and the next episode everything was fine, no mention made of it. In fact, I don’t think any character made any reference to it until this week’s season finale. What I watch in a fictional television series may not have to be realistic, but it does have to be believable.

I had high hopes for Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of the Mandarin, and as a result, the “twist” revealed halfway through the movie struck me as a nearly insurmountable hurdle.

First, the makers of Iron Man 3 decided that the Mandarin’s propaganda videos would make the villain really, really resemble and echo Osama bin Laden. I don’t think that’s necessarily offensive or exploitative; I think that’s hitting the notes that stir fear in our subconscious in a very effective way. (Ben Kingsley talks a bit about it here.) He hates the United States of America for reasons that seem unclear, he’s determined to teach us a lesson, and he launches random, explosive terror attacks at various targets.

But making the Mandarin a ‘fake’ figure, created by a greedy Pentagon contractor who seeks to “control supply and demand of the War on Terror” . . . well, it’s one step away from joining the 9/11 Truthers. Director Shane Black more or less made this point explicitly:

I would say that we struggled to find a way to present a mythic terrorist that had something about him that registered after the movie’s over as having been a unique take, or a clever idea, or a way to say something of use. And what was of use about the Mandarin’s portrayal in this movie, to me, is that it offers up a way that you can sort of show how people are complicit in being frightened. They buy into things in the way that the audience for this movie buys into it. And hopefully, by the end you’re like, “Yeah, we were really frightened of the Mandarin, but in the end he really wasn’t that bad after all.” In fact, the whole thing was just a product of this anonymous, behind-the-scenes guy. I think that’s a message that’s more interesting for the modern world because I think there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes, a lot of fear, that’s generated toward very available and obvious targets, which could perhaps be directed more intelligently at what’s behind them.

Except that the terrorists we see in the real world are not in fact driven by “anonymous behind the scenes guys” like shady defense contractors. The Boston bombers were not secretly being manipulated by Halliburton. The guys who killed our ambassador in Benghazi were not being paid by somebody who wanted a fat contract to provide embassy security in the future. This is conspiracy-theory thinking, and not only does it not fit in well in an Iron Man movie . . . it takes what had been this movie series’ most thoroughly menacing, frightening figure and turns him into a quick, cheap joke, and refocuses us on Guy Pearce’s Killian villain. Meh.

Killian’s grand plot to “control supply and demand in the war on terror,” by the way, makes little or no sense. Is the notion that as he does it, he’ll get rich? He’s already rich. He wants to humiliate Tony Stark, to get revenge for ditching him back in 1999? But he has many opportunities to kill him, and fails to do so.

Oh, and while the president played by William Sadler seems like a good guy who wants to protect the country (although there’s a throwaway reference to failing to prosecute anyone over an oil spill), we get the tired trope of the evil, or at least supremely morally compromised, vice president.

With all this complaining, what worked? Well, the movie’s theme, emphasized explicitly by its closing line, is that our hero is really Tony Stark, not “Iron Man.” The creators decided that Tony would spend a large chunk of this movie torn down to his core, without all of his wealth and high-tech toys, forced to improvise creative new solutions in life-and-death circumstances.

If indeed this is the last Iron Man movie, we’re left with a relentlessly enjoyable character . . . who never quite had a plot or villahat matched what he brought to the screen.

Tags: Something Lighter

Lisa Jackson's Official Portrait: I'm Guessing That's a Watercolor?

By Jim Geraghty

May 16, 2013 3:04 PM

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36

Courtesy Sean Hackbarth, here is the official portrait of former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.

Let your comments meander, flow and rage like . . . like . . . well, I’m sure some metaphor will come to you.

Some are complaining that the $40,000 fee for the portrait is too much, but I would contend that this is the only official government portrait that has come even close to providing $40,000 in entertainment value.

Tags: Lisa Jackson , Something Lighter

Four Key Details in the Released Benghazi E-Mails

By Jim Geraghty

May 16, 2013 8:44 AM

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On “Morning Joe” at the moment, the roundtable seems convinced that yesterday’s release of 100 pages of internal e-mails relating to the Benghazi talking points exonerates the White House and all of the senior-level officials. This suggests that most in the press have not looked at these e-mails all that closely.

There were at least four lines in the Benghazi e-mails that jumped out at me.

Page 4: NE (Near East Desk/Bureau/Division) will add material about warning we gave to Cairo prior to the demonstrations, as well as warnings we issued prior to 9/11 anniversary

We don’t know whether this reference to warnings was a particularly specific one, i.e., beware of anti-American groups trying to stir up trouble outside our embassy in Cairo, or whether it was generic, i.e., beware of groups trying to stir up trouble on September 11 in the Middle East. But I believe this is the first time we’ve heard that the CIA gave warnings to Cairo — either to the Egyptian government or to our diplomatic security in that city — about a potential threat or danger to our diplomatic staff there. This information does not help the “no one could have seen this coming” excuse, particularly when coupled with the requests for additional security from staff in Libya.

Page 61: Fyi FBI says AQ (not AQIM) was involved and they are pursuing that theory.

“AQ” is a reference to al-Qaeda; “AQIM” refers to “al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” the Algerian/North African franchise. This means that by Friday evening, the FBI’s focus was on al-Qaeda, the main international portion, not the groups aiming to overthrow the Algerian government.

If the FBI investigation was focusing al-Qaeda as early as Friday, that doesn’t help explain Ambassador Susan Rice’s emphasis of the protests of the YouTube video on Sunday.

Also on Page 61: “The State Department had major reservations with much or most of the document. We revised with their concerns in mind.”

The first version of the talking points mentioned, “Since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out that individuals had previously surveilled the US facilities, also contributing to the effacy of the attacks” — which would undoubtedly raise questions about what precautions the State Department was making in the weeks and months preceding the attack. The references to the earlier attacks against foreign interests were one of the details edited out.

The evidence that the talking points turned into uninformative, inaccurate mush because of the State Department’s involvement does not help Hillary Clinton.

CIA Office of Congressional Affairs, 9/15: “No mention of the cable to Cairo, either? Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this, then.”

My understanding is that this comment refers to or echoes the assessment of then–CIA director David Petraeus. This comment indicates that at least one party in this complicated process understood that they were losing sight of what they were supposed to be doing — informing Congress and the public of what happened — and generating meaningless, detail-free pabulum.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey notices that almost everyone who is reporting on this has failed to mention to the reference to the FBI.

Tags: Benghazi , Hillary Clinton , Susan Rice , Barack Obama

Who Still Has Faith in Eric Holder?

By Jim Geraghty

May 16, 2013 7:44 AM

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6

From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:

Holder Melts Down

Can anyone, with a straight face, argue that Eric Holder should remain as Attorney General, and the country can have faith in his abilities and judgment in the coming months and years? I mean, apparently he doesn’t even write things down anymore:

Lawmakers skewered Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday over the Justice Department’s sweeping effort to snoop on Associated Press reporters and editors — while the embattled Cabinet secretary kicked responsibility down the chain of command.

Holder was in the hot seat for hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee just days after the scandal broke, telling lawmakers that his deputy, James Cole, was the one who authorized the sweeping subpoena that caused an uproar in both parties.

“It’s an ongoing matter and an ongoing matter in which I know nothing,” Holder said.

Holder says he recused himself from the matter completely — but in an embarrassing admission, he said he hasn’t found a written record of that action.

Dana Milbank rips Holder to shreds:

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: “I don’t know. I don’t know. . . . I would not want to reveal what I know. . . . I don’t know why that didn’t happen. . . . I know nothing, so I’m not in a position really to answer.”

What do you know that Eric Holder doesn’t know? A lot, apparently.

Tags: Eric Holder , Department of Justice

Chris Christie's Primary Campaign Funds: Spend 'Em if You've Got 'Em!

By Jim Geraghty

May 15, 2013 1:02 PM

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You may look at incumbent Republican governor Chris Christie’s gigantic, 30-percentage-point lead in polling for this year’s race in New Jersey and ask yourself, “If he’s so far ahead, why is he spending so much on television advertising?”

Christie spent $1.5 million on the first ad of his reelection bid, and recently dropped another $850,000 to run radio and television versions of a negative attack ad against his likely Democratic rival, state senator Barbara Buono.

Obviously, New Jersey is one of the most expensive states for campaigning, as it is covered by the most expensive television market in the country (New York) and the fourth-most-expensive (Philadelphia). But a big factor is that a significant portion of Christie’s current campaign cash was raised for his primary race (Christie faces nominal opposition from Seth Grossman), so all of that money must be spent by the state’s June 4 primary.

Second, while Buono’s fundraising has been pretty anemic, a liberal group headed by Buono’s former spokesman spent tons of cash on attack ads hitting Christie:

A liberal advocacy group — One New Jersey — has sunk another $700,000 into purchasing airtime for advertisements opposing Gov. Chris Christie, PolitickerNJ.com reports. That brings the group’s total purchases to $1.8 million for television and another $100,00 on radio, the report said.

Russ Schriefer, a veteran of Christie’s 2009 campaign, is advising him again. He and his longtime business partner, Stuart Stevens, the campaign manager for Mitt Romney in 2012, visited National Review’s Washington offices today. Schriefer said that while the outlook for Christie is good right now, he has little doubt that at some point polling in the governor’s race will tighten, at least slightly, as Democrats who are not currently paying much attention to the race drift back into the Buono camp.

Schriefer’s comment about the primary funds echoed one of Stevens’ comments about an unforeseen challenge for the Romney camp in the late spring of 2012. Romney had effectively won the Republican nomination but could not spend money raised for the general election until he was officially named the GOP nominee at the convention in Tampa. Romney and his team were left trying to get people to donate, but only to the primary fund.

“It’s very tough to raise money for a primary campaign that everybody thinks you’ve already won,” Stevens said.

At first glance, this would be an argument for moving conventions to much earlier in the year. Or perhaps the distinction between primary- and general-election campaign donations should be eliminated entirely.

Tags: Chris Christie , Barbara Buono , Mitt Romney , Stu Stevens

Gibbs, Matthews — Who Will Criticize Obama Next, Joe Biden?

By Jim Geraghty

May 15, 2013 7:08 AM

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10

The midweek edition of the Morning Jolt features a big roundup of the coming storm of Obamacare, further evidence that the IRS isn’t good at math, and this point about what happens when a very comfortable administration suddenly finds that its old spin and excuses don’t work anymore:

BOOM: The Implosion of the Obama Excuses for the Scandal Parade

Just how bad has it gotten for the Obama administration?

Not even his old spokesman Robert Gibbs can say his boss is handling this stuff well.

Former Obama White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs — now an MSNBC contributor — explained to Andrea Mitchell this afternoon that President Obama made White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s job more difficult due to his passive response to the scandals surrounding his administration

Carney would have had an easier time defending the president, suggested Gibbs, if the President had spoken out on the IRS scandal over the weekend.

“The problem is this — the tenor of this briefing would be different if the president had spoken about this on Saturday or Sunday and not on Monday,” Gibbs explained shortly after Carney struggled to answer reporters questions in the White House Press Briefing.

Gibbs added that President Obama sounded like he was “losing patience” with the issue “which is what I do with my 9-year-old.”

Gibbs explained that Obama should have used “more vivid” language and proposed a tough commission to look at the issue while waiting for the Inspector General to release his report on the scandal.

Well, at least Obama still has Mr. Leg-Tingle himself, Chris Matthews, who — wait, what?

Matthews: President Obama has got to stop taking advice from sycophants who keep telling him he’s right and only they can be trusted. He needs to act. He needs to fire people. He needs to grab control of his presidency. He needs to surround himself with people who are ready to fight on every front, because the three problems he faces now, Benghazi, the IRS and the FBI are less likely to be two problems by this time next week than there are to be four and counting. Why? Because, as I said, it’s not just that he’s under attack. It’s that he’s vulnerable. And that is obvious to everyone this side of the White House gates.

Who’s going to denounce the president next, Joe Biden?

What we saw in Tuesday’s White House press briefing, where the press corps appeared ready to break out the pitchforks and torches and go French Revolution on Jay Carney’s dishonest tush, is what happens when a very comfortable, very confident administration suddenly finds that none of the traditional scandal defenses work.

Dennis Miller: “Carney blows more smoke than a Rastafarian’s death rattle.”

Tuesday afternoon, Ace of Spades came up with the idea of a scandal-excuse prediction game in the form of an NFL-style draft, and Twitchy collected some of the best.

Ace began with, “low level employees”, took “Obama gives a historic speech” in the second round (overrated, I would argue that player peaked a few years ago and has really seen less playing time in recent years) and concluded the third round with a very versatile selection who gets a lot of playing time, “Some procedures may need review/Procedures have let us down again.” My first-round selection was the offspring of the Hall of Famer that everyone remembers from the breakout 1998 season, “The real story here is the shadowy network behind our critics making these baseless accusations.” In the second round I went with a player who has been on the field almost constantly since the start of the 2009 season, “If you look back to the Bush administration . . .”

It’s easy to predict these because anyone who has followed the news during more than one scandal has seen them before. There is a playbook in these sorts of matters: It wasn’t me, it was that other figure/local office over there. I was out of the loop. I was in the loop, but the concerns were never adequately communicated, in violation of established procedures. I knew about it, but I didn’t approve of it. There’s an ongoing review, I can’t comment. All of this happened a long time ago, you’re obsessed with ancient history. This is a distraction from the real business of the country. Finally, don’t you understand that my political enemies are behind this?

All of the above lines are meant to get you to focus on something besides what happened, who’s responsible, and who should be held accountable. All of this is mean to persuade us that their decisions and actions aren’t the problem; the problem is with us, for asking questions about it.

To hell with that.

“In my defense, you guys always swallowed these lines before.”

Tags: Barack Obama , Robert Gibbs , Chris Matthews , Scandals , Jay Carney

The Mask Is Ripped Off of 'Hope and Change'

By Jim Geraghty

May 14, 2013 6:58 AM

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98

Today’s Morning Jolt is jam-packed, as it is a special ALL-SCANDAL edition!

SCANDAL ONE: Dear Media: Obama’s Indignant Benghazi Response Revealed a Lot Yesterday!

Dear friends in the media.

Come on.

I mean, come on.

You and I know what’s going with the Benghazi thing. Let me share something that I first put into play during the “was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked” debate, but that comes from watching the Lewinsky scandal, the where-did –Mark-Sanford-go scandal, the why-is-David-Wu-dressed-in-a-tiger-suit scandal, and a wide variety of wrongdoing committed by politicians:

When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects.

Nobody withholds exculpatory information. Nobody who’s been accused of something wrong waits for “just the right moment” to unveil information that proves the charge baseless. Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind. It’s not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it’s not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president’s favorite justifications, it’s just common sense.

So . . .

You and I both know, in our guts, and based upon everything we’ve seen in Washington since we started our careers, that there’s no innocent explanation for the Obama administration’s actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks.

If there were good reasons for why the requests for additional security from staff in Libya didn’t generate any serious response in the halls of the State Department, we would have heard it by now. If there were evidence that everyone within the State Department, military, and White House were doing everything they could to rescue our guys on that awful night, we would have heard about it long ago. If there was a good reason for the “talking points” to get edited down from a false premise (a demonstration) but at least serious information (previous CIA warnings about terrorist activity) to false pabulum, we would have heard it by now; the latest lame excuse is that the fourteen edits merely reflect “bureaucratic infighting between the CIA and State.” And if there was a good reason for State Department lawyers to call up Deputy Chief of Mission Gregory Hicks and tell him not to allow the RSO, the acting Deputy Chief of Mission, and himself to be interviewed by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, we would have heard that by now, too.

Come on, guys. What do we think is going on when Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff calls up the acting ambassador, and harangues him about the lack of a State Department lawyer for his conversation with Congress? Does anybody really believe it’s just her checking up to make sure protocol was followed?

You can see what’s going on here. You may not want to see it, or believe it, but you can see it. The federal government made awful, unforgivable wrong decisions about the security for its people in Benghazi. They compounded the error by failing to put together even the beginning of a rescue mission during the seven-hour assault. Perhaps those responsible for making the call had a fear of a “Black Hawk Down” scenario, in which the rescuers find themselves needing rescue, but whatever the reasoning, the net effect was the same: our people were under fire, fighting for their lives, and nobody was coming to help. The decisions made that night make a mockery of the unofficial, but widespread motto of our armed forces: “Nobody gets left behind.”

The decisions made up until this point may or may not have involved the president or then-Secretary of State Clinton, but they sure as hell were involved in the decisions that came afterwards. The morning after the attack, the administration tried to offer the excuse that it was a completely unforeseeable event, randomly triggered by some YouTube video. And they sought to intimidate and punish anyone who would contradict their storyline.

My friends in media, you know what is going on when you see President Obama say this:

The whole issue of talking points, frankly, throughout this process has been a sideshow. What we have been very clear about throughout was that immediately after this event happened we were not clear who exactly had carried it out, how it had occurred, what the motivations were.

You know what this is: Stop looking at what I did, and start looking at the people accusing me of wrongdoing. We’ve seen this tactic before: “The vast right-wing conspiracy.”

We know the president’s claim that there was confusion is false, because everyone on the ground was clearly telling their bosses that this was a terror attack from the beginning. No one in Benghazi or Libya was saying this was a protest as a result of a YouTube video. Where did that idea come from? Who within the administration decided to take accurate information and start inserting inaccurate information?

The president continues:

It happened at the same time as we had seen attacks on U.S. embassies in Cairo as a consequence of this film. And nobody understood exactly what was taking place during the course of those first few days.

No, the folks on the ground understood what was taking place. They just said so before Congress and a lot of television cameras. Why is the president confused about this?

Obama continues:

And the fact that this keeps on getting churned out, frankly, has a lot to do with political motivations. We’ve had folks who have challenged Hillary Clinton’s integrity, Susan Rice’s integrity, Mike Mullen and Tom Pickering’s integrity. It’s a given that mine gets challenged by these same folks. They’ve used it for fundraising.

The motivations and/fundraising of those who disagree with you are irrelevant to whether or not you’re telling the truth, Mr. President.

SCANDAL TWO: Hey, Why Does the IRS Have to Tell the Truth to Congress, Anyway?

NBC News points out that the IRS appears to have directly lied to Congress when asked about the targeting of conservative groups:

Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division on tax-exempt organizations, learned in June 2011 that agents had targeted groups with names including “Tea Party” and “Patriots,” according to the draft obtained by NBC News.

She “instructed that the criteria immediately be revised,” according to the draft. Ten months later, in March 2012, the IRS commissioner at the time, Douglas Shulman, testified to Congress that the IRS was not targeting tax-exempt groups based on their politics.

The IRS said over the weekend that senior executives were not aware of the targeting, but it remains unclear who knew what and when. [Then IRS Commissioner] Shulman, who left the agency last fall, has not spoken publicly about the scandal and did not answer a request for comment Monday from NBC News.

Members of Congress had sent letters to Shulman as early as June 2011 asking specifically about targeting of conservative groups, according to a House Ways and Means Committee summary obtained by NBC News.

The IRS responded at least six times but made no mention of targeting conservatives, according to the committee’s summary.

“Oh, you mean that effort to conservative groups, we thought you meant a different one.”

Remember the explanation that this was just some runaway low-level employees in one office? Yeah, that was bull: “Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.”

SCANDAL THREE: Of Course Eric Holder Is Allowed to Secretly Eavesdrop on Journalists!

You know a scandal is bad when I can point you to the Huffington Post’s summary, because it can’t collect any more outrage than I can:

Journalists reacted with shock and outrage at the news that the Justice Department had secretly obtained months of phone records of Associated Press journalists.

The AP broke the news on Monday about what it called an “unprecedented intrusion” into its operation. It said that the DOJ had obtained detailed phone records from over 20 different lines, potentially monitoring hundreds of different journalists without notifying the organization. The wire service’s president, Gary Pruitt, wrote a blistering letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, accusing the DOJ of violating the AP’s constitutional rights.

Reporters and commentators outside the AP professed themselves to be equally angered. “The Nixon comparisons write themselves,” BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith tweeted. Margaret Sullivan, the public editor for the New York Times, called the story “disturbing.” Washington Post editor Martin Baron called it “shocking.” CNN’s John King described it as “very chilling.”

Speaking to the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, a lawyer for the AP called the DOJ’s actions “outrageous,” saying they were “a dagger to the heart of AP’s newsgathering activity.”

BuzzFeed’s Kate Nocera was perhaps more pithy, writing simply, “what in the f–k.”

You “Hope and Change” true believers were a bunch of chumps.

As this illustration over at Ace of Spades reveals . . .

Tags: Barack Obama , Eric Holder , Benghazi , IRS , Scandals

Should Gabriel Gomez Be a Priority for National GOP Groups?

By Jim Geraghty

May 13, 2013 10:45 AM

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How much should national Republicans invest in the effort to elect Gabriel Gomez in Massachusetts’s special Senate election June 25?

Some evidence — such as this poll commissioned by the Gomez campaign — points to an extremely competitive race:

The May 5–7 poll of 800 likely special-election voters by OnMessage, Inc., a Republican political consulting firm, found [Democrat Ed] Markey leading [Republican Gabriel] Gomez 46 percent to 43 percent, with 11 percent undecided. According to an OnMessage polling memo, respondents “were stratified by county based on previous election results to reflect historic voter trends.”

On the other hand, WBUR had Markey up by 8 among likely voters with leaners (46 percent to 38 percent) and Suffolk put Markey up 52 percent to 35 percent.

Even an incompetent Markey campaign will still enjoy the advantage of running in a heavily Democratic state, and Gomez’s task will be supremely difficult if he doesn’t get significant financial support from national Republicans and conservatives. Right now, national Republican and conservative groups are weighing that decision.

The NRSC is debuting a new web video, pointing out that Markey was caught up in the notorious House Bank scandal 20 years ago and consistently voted to increase his own salary.

As a Massachusetts Republican, Gomez is not a down-the-line conservative by any stretch. Massachusetts talk-radio host Michael Graham deems Gomez unsupportable because of the candidate’s past support for Barack Obama. Gomez says he wants to close “the gun-show loophole” and also says he’s pro-life but “Roe v Wade is settled law. Politicians spend way too much time on divisive issues that are already decided and far too little time on fixing our economy.” He supports same-sex marriage. He backs a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants with no criminal record.

On the other hand, Gomez says he backs a secure border, supports the Keystone pipeline, and says Obamacare is “ignoring or compounding the underlying costs of health care.” Plus he has a sterling background for a senator: graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, platoon leader in the Navy SEALs, MBA from Harvard Business School and successful entrepreneur and Little League coach. He’ll be a vote for Mitch McConnell to be Senate majority leader instead of Harry Reid. And if the party wants to do better among Hispanics, why not make a solid effort to elect the third Latino Republican senator, as Gomez is a son of Colombian immigrants?

The new revelations of the Benghazi hearings and the IRS scandal probably energized the GOP base. The coming months or year may feel a lot like the political environment of 2009 and 2010.

Finally, if Markey were to win narrowly, would even that result reinforce the notion that the political environment has tilted in favor of the GOP? Republicans shocked the opposition by winning in South Carolina’s special election, and should have a breeze in a Missouri House special election. The New Jersey governor’s race doesn’t look competitive, and Cuccinelli is off to the better start in Virginia. Undoubtedly, the GOP’s campaign committees would love to enter 2014 having swept every competitive special election.

Tags: Gabriel Gomez , Ed Markey , Special Elections

Scarborough, Todd Wonder Why Democrats Are Shrugging at IRS Scandal

By Jim Geraghty

May 13, 2013 9:01 AM

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On MSNBC this morning, Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough dance around the obvious conclusion:

TODD: Why aren’t there more Democrats jumping on this? This is outrageous no matter what political party you are, that an arm of the government, maybe it’s a set of people just in one office but, mind you, that one office was put in charge of dealing with these 501c4s and things like that.

SCARBOROUGH: Why didn’t the president say something on Friday afternoon?

TODD: I don’t know. Maybe they were distracted by Benghazi. Maybe they made the decision they didn’t want it to be about healthcare. I raised this question — where is the sense of outrage? And the only pushback was, Jay Carney spoke about this at the press briefing and he was pretty strong. I have to say it didn’t sound very strong to me. I don’t know if the White House realizes. I think this story has more legs politically in 2014 than Benghazi.

The obvious conclusion: President Obama, the past and current secretaries of the Treasury, and Democrats on Capitol Hill don’t really care! To them, the use of government resources to harass and impede their political opponents is just how the game is played.

When Obama came to Washington, he brought the Chicago rules with him.

Tags: IRS , Barack Obama , Congressional Democrats

May 2013: The End of Unreasonable Paranoia

By Jim Geraghty

May 13, 2013 7:41 AM

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The first Morning Jolt of the week features a furious denunciation of the media’s excuses for losing interest in Benghazi, a look at Mika Brzezinski’s new book, Obsessed: America’s Food Addiction — and My Own, and of course, the fact that a lot of our once-“paranoid” fears have proven true lately . . .

No Kidding: The IRS Has Had a Vendetta against Conservatives Since 2011

Let’s see here. . . . The Benghazi hearings and reporting about the “editing” of the talking points indicate that the Obama administration covered up the truth about what happened. Then we learned one of the Boston bombers sought out jihadists while in Russia in 2011 and listened to Internet sermons of al-Qaeda fan/cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, while collecting public assistance. Then we learned disclosures from the IRS prove that the federal government targeted groups based upon their political views. Hell of a week for the fears we once dismissed as paranoia, huh? This afternoon we get Elvis’s reappearance and Thursday is scheduled to feature the truth about the aliens at Roswell.

Naturally, today Obama will deal with these shocking headlines in his traditional manner: going to a bunch of Democratic fundraisers in New York City.

And yes, the IRS story is basically as bad as the most paranoid would have you believe; sometimes they really are out to get you.

The Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those that had “tea party” or “patriot” in their names — as the agency admitted Friday — to also include ones that raised concerns over government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to “make America a better place to live,” according to new details of a government probe.

The investigation also revealed that a high-ranking IRS official knew as early as mid-2011 that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted — nearly a year before then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a congressional committee the agency wasn’t targeting conservative groups.

The new disclosures are likely to inflame a widening controversy over IRS handling of dozens of applications by tea-party, patriot and other conservative groups for tax-exempt status.

The details emerged from disclosures to congressional investigators by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The findings, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, don’t make clear who came up with the idea to give extra scrutiny to the conservative groups.

The inspector general’s office has been conducting an audit of the IRS’s handling of the applications process and is expected to release a report this week. The audit follows complaints last year by numerous tea-party and other conservative groups that they had been singled out and subjected to excessive and inappropriate questioning. Many groups say they were asked for lists of their donors and other sensitive information.

One point to keep in mind: Sometimes no organizational boss has to explicitly say that there’s a great incentive to target a particular political foe. Sometimes these sorts of illegal and unjust incentives simply resonate throughout the culture of an organization. If everyone within a particular office culture (i.e., Internal Revenue Service employees) believes that a particular group is particularly bad (conservatives) and another group is good (liberals), there will be enormous psychological incentives to pursue the “bad” groups, both out of personal beliefs and out of reinforcing groupthink.

There’s a simple, direct method for changing the culture, of course: fire anybody involved.

Tags: Barack Obama , Boston Marathon Bombing , IRS , Benghazi

Cuccinelli: 'The Powerful & Well Connected Already Get Their Breaks'

By Jim Geraghty

May 13, 2013 7:23 AM

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Virginia’s Republican candidate for governor, Ken Cuccinelli, is up on the air with his second television ad:

Is it just me, or does the background music sound a lot like an acoustic version of Green Day’s “21 Guns“?

The script:

I’m Ken Cuccinelli.

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy.

But they are being overtaxed and over regulated.

I’ve a plan to make Virginia an engine for job growth.

It starts with closing tax loopholes and putting an end to special interest giveaways.

We’ll use the savings to cut taxes for those who’ve earned it: job creating small businesses and middle class families.

The powerful and well connected already get their breaks.

As Governor, I’ll be on your side.

Gee, who do you think he’s alluding to in his reference to “the powerful and well connected”?

Tags: Ken Cuccinelli , Terry McAuliffe

ABC Finds Benghazi Talking Points Extensively Edited by State Dept.

By Jim Geraghty

May 10, 2013 7:22 AM

Comments

38

The final Morning Jolt of the week features trouble in Syria, Kerry getting static from Russia, an argument against the immigration bill from an unexpected source, more worries from . . . but the lead item is the morning’s breaking news:

BREAKING: Jay Carney Lied About the Benghazi Talking Points

Breaking this morning, from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Here’s the kicker:

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned . . .”

Hey, why would they want to accurately inform the public if it might result in criticism from Congress, right?

Tags: Benghazi , Jay Carney , Barack Obama , U.S. State Department

Stop Seeing Benghazi Through the 2016 Campaign Lens

By Jim Geraghty

May 9, 2013 12:41 PM

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15

I’m seeing some Republicans e-mail this Buzzfeed article by Rosie Gray, headlined “Benghazi Investigation Creeps Closer to Hillary Clinton.”

As I said on “Daily Rundown,” it is a mistake for the media — and Republicans — to examine the events in Benghazi, the decisions before, during, and after it, and the investigation into all of this, through the lens of the 2016 presidential race.

A full uncovering of the facts may be enormously damaging to any presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton, or it may not be. (We may strongly suspect it will be, but we don’t know that, and it would be foolish to let that concern drive the investigation.) A thorough account of everyone’s actions that night may leave Clinton looking awful, or the facts may reveal she did the best she could in difficult circumstances. The point is that we don’t really know right now, and the issue should not be dropped until the public feels like they know how and why those key decisions were reached.

The Pickering-Mullen investigation, requested by the U.S. State Department, had so many strange omissions and failed to interview so many key witnesses and figures that even the State Department’s inspector general is reviewing it.

Today Andrew Malcolm asserts that “the big Benghazi mystery” was “where was Obama while four Americans perished?” The answer has always been pretty clear: at the White House. He was informed at the beginning of the evening by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, and then informed of the aftermath the following morning. As far as he and his administration were concerned, his staff was on it.

SEN. KELLY AYOTTE (R-NH): But just to be clear, that night [the president] didn’t ask you what assets we had available and how quickly they could respond and how quickly we could help those people there-

PANETTA: No. I think the biggest problem that night, Senator, is that nobody knew really what was going on there.

AYOTTE: And there was no follow up during the night, at least from the White House directly?

PANETTA: No. No, there wasn’t.

DEMPSEY: I would, if I could just, to correct one thing. I wouldn’t say there was no follow-up from the White House. There was no follow-up, to my knowledge, with the president. But his staff was engaged with the national military command center pretty constantly through the period, which is the way it would normally work.

AYOTTE: But no direct communication from him?

DEMPSEY: Not on my part, no.

It’s not clear that the president’s staying awake and getting constant updates would have changed the outcome. The president’s involvement matters if A) there was some sort of operation that only he could authorize, and that he failed to, or B) he ordered forces to stand down, an allegation not yet proven.

Hicks testified yesterday that “Lieutenant Colonel Gibson,” a Special Operations Command Africa commander in Tripoli, wanted to board a C-130 that was going to fly to Benghazi. According to Hicks, Gibson commanded a four-person Special Forces team, a quartet that was once part of a 14-person team assigned to establish security for U.S. diplomats after the 2011 Libyan revolution.

Gibson told Hicks that he had been ordered he was not to proceed to board the airplane.

I realize that Representative Ann Wagner stated that only the president could give a “stand down” order for a rescue operation. But right now, the only witness we have for this “stand down” order is Hicks, and at this point we don’t even know Gibson’s first name.

For now, one of yesterday’s most stunning revelations was the news that at no point did the U.S. ask the Libyans for permission to fly into their airspace for a rescue operation, presumably one of the first steps in putting together an operation like that. In other words, at no point during the seven hours did the ball get rolling on an effort to rescue them. With all of the U.S. military personnel, aircraft, and NATO air bases in Italy, Greece, and Turkey, nothing got moving. Baffling to the point of madness. If their had been an operation in the works that arrived too late, the public reaction would be completely different — the fury out there isn’t because these four Americans weren’t rescued in time; it’s because at this point, there’s no evidence anyone in our entire apparatus tried.

Let the facts of this investigation lead us to the conclusion, not the other way around.

UPDATE: Today’s “Daily Rundown” appearance:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tags: Benghazi , Hillary Clinton , Barack Obama

The 'Complicated, but All Bad' Scandal in New York's State Legislature

By Jim Geraghty

May 9, 2013 10:56 AM

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16

Rusty Weiss points out that, like many other objects that are for sale, politicians are cheaper when you buy them in bulk:

Federal investigators were tracking nine Democrats in a probe involving State Senator Shirley Huntley, who wore a wire to record conversations with her colleagues. . . . Almost a quarter of the state Senate’s Democratic conference was in the FBI’s cross hairs last year, according to a court filing unsealed Wednesday. . . . Separate filings indicate that only one of the nine investigated Democrats is believed to have done nothing criminally negligent.

That last guy must have missed a memo.

Glad to see Albany’s gotten cleaned up in the post-Spitzer, post-Patterson era. I’ll give New York governor Andrew Cuomo credit for a simple and accurate assessment: “Complicated, but basically all bad.”

That phrase applies to the state legislature as a whole, no?

Tags: New York , State Legislatures

Why the Right Is Growing Cynical About the 'Common Good'

By Jim Geraghty

May 9, 2013 7:38 AM

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133

I’m scheduled to appear on Chuck Todd’s “Daily Rundown” on MSNBC around 9:40 or so this morning. It’s a busy media stretch for me, as I’ll go up to New York to appear on “Real News” on The Blaze on Friday evening, and then Sunday I’m on Howard Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources.”

The Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt features a lot about the Benghazi hearings, the notion of a conservative “ghetto” in media, and then these thoughts:

Why Conservatives Are Growing Cynical About the Concept of the ‘Common Good’

Pete Wehner wonders if conservatives have forgotten, or lost interest, in the value of community:

It strikes me that this ancient insight — of how we do not live in isolation, that we are part of a continuum — has been a bit neglected by American conservatives in recent years. The emphasis one hears these days has to do almost solely with liberty, which of course is vital. But there is also the trap of hyper-individualism. What’s missing, I think, is an appropriate appreciation — or at least a public appreciation — for community, social solidarity, and the common good; for the obligations and attachments we have to each other and the role institutions play in forming those attachments.

It’s not exactly clear to me why conservatives have neglected these matters. It may be the result of a counter-reaction to President Obama’s expansion of the size, scope, and reach of the federal government, combined with a growing libertarian impulse within conservatism. Whatever the explanation, conservatives are making an error — a political error, a philosophical error, a human error — in ignoring (at least in our public language) this understanding of the richness and fullness of life.

Conservatism has never been simply about being left alone. It is not exclusively about self-reliance, individual drive and “rugged individualism,” as important as these things are. We need to be careful about portraying life in a constricted way, since our characters and personalities and sensibilities are shaped by so many other factors and forces and people all along the way.

Permit me to offer a theory or two . . .

We’ve always been a diverse country, but I suspect that a lot of conservatives click on the television or web or look at the morning paper or magazine and see a country they just don’t recognize anymore.

The sense of alienation isn’t racial, but it is cultural. How many conservatives look out upon large swaths of their fellow countrymen and feel as if they’re dealing with someone from another planet, someone whose thinking, values, worldview, and priorities are so alien, they simply can’t understand them?

Our political differences and culture wars are a big part of it. But I think it goes even further. How many times can a conservative encounter the low-information voters who don’t know who the vice president is, or watch the folks on the street get stumped by basic questions in Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” segments, and not lose some faith in the American people as a whole?

For starters, I really have only the vaguest idea who Jodi Arias is. According to cable news producers, this trial is a really, really, really big deal.

I remember reading the joke, “Far in the future, aliens will come and find the relics of our modern civilization and conclude that Kim Kardashian was our queen.” I really don’t understand why I’m supposed to care about this woman, and I don’t understand why it seems that I’m constantly being told things about her.

I suppose someone could argue that my interest in football or superhero movies or Star Wars is similarly frivolous. But a functioning constitutional republic relies on an informed public to hold its government accountable, and it feels like large swaths of our public checked out of this whole process, finding any duties of citizenship to be a drag.

Any American who worked their butt off through college and did the entry-level, low-pay jobs at the beginning of their working lives looks at the Occupy Movement and wonders how the heck someone can begin adulthood with such a ludicrous sense of entitlement. Anybody who’s interacted with the government looks at a takeover of the health-care system as a nationwide slow-motion train wreck happening before our eyes. We saw more of it yesterday; anybody who watched the Benghazi hearing is left slack-jawed, marveling at the raw cynicism at work at the highest levels of our government.

It’s very hard to be motivated to help “the common good” when you sense that a good portion of the folks you’re being asked to help are exercising bad judgment, unwilling to work hard, unwilling to make similar sacrifices, unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, and so on.

Tags: Conservatives

The First Administration Spin on Benghazi Crumbles

By Jim Geraghty

May 8, 2013 12:14 PM

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12

Some of the administration’s friends, such as CNN contributor Hilary Rosen, are pushing the line that today’s hearings on the Benghazi consulate attack and the administration’s response cannot be taken seriously, because Chairman Issa is somehow suppressing the testimony from other key figures in the Benghazi events and investigation. Rosen tweeted, “Rep. Darrell Issa’s Benghazi hearing today has no credibility since he refused to let the Chair of the Independent Commission testify.”

Except that Issa’s staff says that “the two men who headed the review — former ambassador Thomas Pickering and Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — declined invitations to testify.”

Jonathan Karl, ABC News chief White House correspondent, says the committee “released letter inviting Pickering to testify dated February 22.”

So the first spin is proven false. But that doesn’t seem to matter to the committee’s Democrats. Ranking minority member Elijah Cummings declared, “Today’s hearing is not the full story” — before a single question was asked, or a single witness offered a single word.

UPDATE: Letters below:

The Mullen letter, also dated Feb. 22.

Tags: Benghazi

The Fine Print of Today's New Poll in Virginia

By Jim Geraghty

May 8, 2013 10:32 AM

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Okay, fine, NBC News/Marist poll, you can lead with the news that you find Democrat Terry McAuliffe ahead of Republican Ken Cuccinelli, 43 percent to 41 percent, among registered voters. Yes, it’s probably early to apply a likely-voter screen, as we just don’t know how well each campaign will energize its base voters. When Marist does apply the likely-voter screen, Cuccinelli leads, 45 percent to 42 percent.

But we probably ought to spotlight that 19 percent of registered-voter respondents say they have never voted in a gubernatorial election before.

Cuccinelli’s got a 51 percent approval rating for his performance as state attorney general, with 24 percent disapproval, among registered voters.

Asked about the impact of the sequester on themselves, the poll finds that 54 percent of registered voters say the sequester has had “not much at all” and 21 percent say “just some.”

Tags: Terry McAuliffe , Ken Cuccinelli

If Last Night Surprised You, You Probably Followed the National Coverage

By Jim Geraghty

May 8, 2013 9:49 AM

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23

The margin in last night’s special House election was nine percentage points, more than a 12,000-vote margin. It wasn’t that close. And yet very little of the coverage suggested that was in the cards. Why?

For starters, if you followed the national coverage and mainstream-press narrative, you would be stunned at the results, believing that Colbert Busch was a great candidate, only enhanced by having a famous brother.

A few points from Politico’s coverage:

While the former governor barnstormed the district, Colbert Busch seemed to be in hiding. She rarely held public events — and when she did, she was sometimes in a hurry to leave.

The flaws of Colbert Busch were visible to anyone who cared to look. She flopped in her first national interview, back in late February, offering a barely coherent word salad on pretty basic issues like reducing the debt and entitlement reform. She refused to say whether she would vote for Nancy Pelosi to be Speaker of the House. She didn’t take questions at most of her events; Sanford was eager to do as many debates as possible and she agreed to only one.

It’s as if she didn’t really want to talk about much of anything during this campaign, believing that the media’s incantation “Appalachian Trail” would be enough to persuade the voters of the district that by default, she had to be the better choice, no matter what policies she preferred.

As Politico notes:

After months of relentless focus on his personal life — his upcoming marriage to his Argentine fiancée, the charges that he trespassed at his ex-wife’s house and more — the theatrics helped Sanford turn the race into a debate about issues.

A House race focusing on issues! What a concept!

What we see here is another refutation of what I’ve called a “beautiful little fairy tale that liberals tell themselves,” that the American public is broadly supportive of their worldview, and they only lose because Republicans manage to Jedi-Mind-Trick the electorate into caring about distractions, silliness, and those irrelevant “wedge issues.”

Joe Klein offered a good example of the fairy tale in his novel, Primary Colors:

“The point is — EAGLETON,” Libby said. “You remember, Jack? I must have known you — what, two days, then? We hear about the electroshock, and it’s weird: That’s the first time I actually considered the possibility that we might lose to that [bad word] Nixon. Before that, I was absolutely convinced we would win. I mean, who would ever vote for Tricky? No one I knew, ‘cept the idiots I escaped from back in Partridge, Texas. Can you imagine, Henry? We were so [badwording] YOUNG. And this one, this one” — she nodded over toward Stanton — “he takes me out, we go to this little open-air Cuban joint, and I’ve got my head in my hands. Life has ended . And THEY did it — the CIA. It had to be the CIA. I couldn’t believe that Tom Eagleton would really be a nutcase. They had to have dragged him off and drugged him and made him crazy. It couldn’t have been that McGovern was just a COMPLETE [BADWORDING] AMATEUR. No, they did dirty tricks. And I said to Jack, ‘We gotta get the capability.’ You remember Jack? ‘We gotta be able to do that, too.’ And you said, ‘No. Our job is to END all that. Our job is to make it clean. Because if it’s clean, we win — because our ideas are better.’ You remember that, Jack?”

The fairy tale is that Americans, deep down, really agree with liberals on all of these issues and would heartily embrace their agenda if only these side issues, scandals, and manufactured distractions would just get out of the way.

But the electorate doesn’t always think liberal ideas are better, and we may argue that they rarely do. Certainly they didn’t in this district, which is why Elizabeth Colbert Busch had to run from the word “Democrat,” and had to cite a childhood sighting of John F. Kennedy for the reason she’s in the party. Her issue-free campaign was noted in the local press, but the national press seemed blinded by the glamour of being associated with one of their favorite comedians.

It’s bad enough for the press to not know the district, but national Democrats don’t have that excuse. Today you’re hearing a lot of talk along the lines of, “Oh, everyone knew this was a really conservative district and that Sanford would probably win.” Well, you don’t spend more than $2 million ($1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford) for a race you know you can’t win. Maybe this race really was unwinnable for Democrats, but that means that the DCCC and its allies have serious problems in assessing the terrain and determining which races ought to be prioritized.

Finally, Public Policy Polling painted an astonishingly different portrait of this race 15 days ago — even with the difficulty of polling in a special election, an 18-point swing in two weeks is pretty remarkable. Most likely, Colbert Busch never enjoyed a nine-point lead (Democratic representative Jim Clyburn said her internal polls never had her ahead by more than three) and the sample of two weeks ago just wasn’t a likely representation of which voters would show up on Election Day.

The Name ‘Pelosi,’ the Voldemort of Red House Districts

By Jim Geraghty

May 8, 2013 7:20 AM

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4

Today’s Morning Jolt features a preview of the Benghazi hearings, praise for an NR colleague, and then last night’s big news . . .

This Just In from South Carolina: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Hey, Democrats. You just spent a bundle and lost . . . to Mark Sanford.

The argument that we can’t learn anything about 2014 from an individual special House race is generally true. But Alex Roarty of National Journal — a.k.a. that insider, non-conservative publication that National Review staffers are often mixed up with — repeats my point from yesterday: Democrats put a lot of money and effort into this race, against a Republican candidate they thought was uniquely beatable. (And in fact, he was. But “uniquely beatable” doesn’t always mean you will beat him.)

Now we see all of that Democratic spending gained nothing: $1.2 million in donations to Colbert Busch, more than $929,000 on independent expenditures against Sanford . . . FLUSH!

And there is a lesson for 2014: Mark Sanford managed to overcome the electorate’s wariness about him by emphasizing that a vote for his opponent was a vote for Nancy Pelosi and the Obama agenda. Red-state and red-district Democrats have always had a tough balancing act, emphasizing how they’re not like those other Democrats; Elizabeth Colbert Busch in the end just wasn’t a talented enough candidate to pull that off. (In short, she wasn’t that talented a candidate at all. “The Solyndra of the South,” as Nathan Wurtzel summarized.)

Any remaining red-district Democrats really have to run hard from Pelosi from now until November 2014.

Moe Lane:

This should have gone to the Democrats; but, well, there’s that pesky albatross. May Nancy Pelosi stay House Minority Leader, well, forever. . . . If they can’t win House seats in R districts under these circumstances, they won’t win ‘em under more even ones.

Betsy Woodruff was at the victory party:

There will be lots of analysis in the days to come about what this election means, but one thing isn’t up for debate: Mark Sanford knows how to campaign, and his win here is due at least in part to his tireless canvassing and cheerful willingness to ask for the vote of anyone who would listen to him.

When he arrived at the victory party, Sanford was in full-on retail-politics mode. I followed the former governor on the campaign trail the day before the election and wrote about his perpetual handshaking and small-talking. Winning the election doesn’t seem to have tempered his pace. When he arrives at the party, he laps around the front of the building (which, a server tells me, is more crowded than it’s ever been), posing for pictures and hugging supporters.

Two things are different from the day before, though: First, he’s wearing a suit instead of stained khakis and busted-up shoes, and actually looks like someone who might belong in the halls of the Capitol. And second, he’s got his oldest son, Marshall, in tow. He looks around for his son every minute or two — when he loses sight of him, he asks the nearest staffer, “Where’d Marshall go?” and whenever he gets a chance, he introduces the 20-year-old to supporters who haven’t met him.

Mark Sanford’s sister, Sarah Sanford Rauch, isn’t far behind. She’s one of his veteran campaign volunteers, and she’s outspoken about her support for her embattled brother. I ask her how she feels.

“Exhausted,” she tells me. “It’s the toughest race I’ve ever been in. I’ve helped out on a bunch of races, but this is the toughest, by far.”

“You wake up every morning and you look at the newspaper and you wait to see what anvil is getting dropped on your head each day,” she adds.

Somebody else is feeling the headache this morning.

In other words, while Pelosi has always had a handful of members who were likely to stray, she can expect even less agreement from members like Jim Matheson of Utah (R+16), Nick Rahall of West Virginia (R+14), Mike McIntyre of North Carolina (R+12), John Barrow of Georgia (R+9), and Collin Peterson of Minnesota (R+6) — and perhaps Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona (R+4), Patrick Murphy of Florida (R+3), Pete Gallego of Texas (R+3), and Ron Barber of Arizona (R+3). Because if invoking Pelosi was key to Sanford overcoming the well-funded Colbert Busch, imagine how it will play in districts where the Republican doesn’t have Sanford’s baggage?

Tags: Mark Sanford , Elizabeth Colbert Busch , Nancy Pelosi , House Democrats , House Republicans

Cuccinelli Unveils an Economic Plan

By Jim Geraghty

May 7, 2013 4:50 PM

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1

Here is the short version of Ken Cuccinelli’s economic plan, unveiled today:

Reduce the individual income tax rate from 5.75 percent to 5 percent over four years;

Establish a Small Business Tax Relief Commission (to be launched in December 2013) with the following strategic goals:
Eliminate or reduce the harmful effects of the Business Professional Occupational License (BPOL) Tax, the Machine and Tool (M&T) Tax, and the Merchants Capital (MC) Tax, while maintaining local government revenue;

Reduce the Personal Income Tax and the Corporate Income Tax;

Identify and eliminate outdated exemptions and loopholes that promote crony capitalism;

Ensure state government growth does not exceed inflation plus population growth;

Reduce the corporate income tax from 6 percent to 4 percent

Cuccinelli unveiled his Economic Growth & Virginia Jobs Plan at SweetFrog Frozen Yogurt, a Richmond based frozen-yogurt shop established in 2009 and now franchised throughout the United States. SweetFrog makes community outreach and involvement a top priority. The plan can be found online here.

Virginia had been enjoying monthly tax revenue that exceeded its budgetary requirements for a while — but they’ve hit a rough patch recently:

For 22 months, from August 2010 until last May, every month but one brought revenues exceeding those collected in the same month the year before. Seven of them showed double-digit growth . . . Virginia’s revenue numbers are sputtering again in a recovery that’s never really caught fire. Six of the past 12 months have been downers; the worst was March’s 6.1 percent general revenue drop.

Defense cuts and federal worker furloughs could end up hitting the state’s income and sales tax revenue hard.

On the other hand, Virginia voters are in a pretty good mood at the moment. The state’s unemployment rate is only 5.3 percent, the tenth-lowest in the country. Incumbent GOP governor Bob McDonnell, who cannot run again, has an approval rating of 64 percent in the most recent Washington Post poll, and 52 percent think the state is headed in the right direction, while only 36 percent believe it’s on the “wrong track.” What’s more, 5 percent say the state’s economy is “excellent” while 56 percent say it’s “good.”

Tags: Ken Cuccinelli

The President's Perpetual Campaign Continues

By Jim Geraghty

May 7, 2013 10:37 AM

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4

The Pentagon accused China of cyber-espionage; the conflict in Syria is now “a brutal campaign of sectarian cleansing,” with death toll around 80,000; sectarian violence is spreading to Iraq and Lebanon; North Korea is issuing new threats; more bombings in Pakistan; our overseas consulates have indicated possible terror attacks this summer; the suicide rate is up 28 percent in the past ten years; millions of part-time U.S. workers may see their hours cut because of the Obamacare rules; wages have been virtually flat since 2009 and, as Bloomberg puts it, “long-term unemployment is turning the jobless into pariahs”; only 57 percent of Americans are doing any saving for retirement at all (down from 65 percent in 2009); and the rate of single parenthood has increased more dramatically as the Great Recession drags on.

So, what’s the president doing tonight, Mark Knoller? “This evening, Pres Obama attends a DNC fundraiser at a local hotel. His 5th fundraiser this year. But no press coverage.”

He golfed yesterday, of course, his twelfth round in his second term.

Tags: Barack Obama , DNC , Campaign Fundraising

McAuliffe Pledges ‘Targeted Business Incentive Programs’

By Jim Geraghty

May 7, 2013 9:08 AM

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5

Hmmm:

“We want somebody who wakes up thinking about jobs, thinking about the economy, thinking about finding a great deal, thinking about training the workforce,” [Democratic Sen. and former Gov.] Tim Kaine said. “That’s why I’m supporting Terry McAuliffe to be the next governor of the Commonwealth.”

Oh, I have no doubt McAuliffe is quite skilled at finding a great deal. The question is, “a great deal for whom?”

Elsewhere in the Washington Post’s coverage, they note, “Beyond education, McAuliffe’s policy blueprint calls for targeted business incentive programs and diversifying the state’s economic base.”

“Targeted business incentive programs.” Oh, I have no doubt that economic assistance under a Governor McAuliffe would be targeted.

As he said in his autobiography:

Let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to raise money for a governor. They have all kinds of business to hand out, road contracts, construction jobs, you name it.

You may scoff: Surely the risk of humilation would prevent him from directing “incentives” to his friends and donors! But as he proudly boasts when discussing the time a casino owner demanded he go up and sing on a stage for a donation, “For $500,000 I don’t mind humiliating myself for five minutes.”

Would a Governor McAuliffe mix politics and business? Heck, he brags about how he does it:

McAuliffe has said that his work in politics has bolstered his business career. “I’ve met all of my business contacts through politics. It’s all interrelated,” he told the New York Times in 1999.

As he summarized it to the Washington Post in 2009:

I’ve done business with people I’ve met in politics, who I went to law school with, who I grew up with . . . Who do you do business with? People you meet in life.

Tags: Terry McAuliffe

No Showboating at the Benghazi Hearings, Please

By Jim Geraghty

May 7, 2013 7:26 AM

Comments

20

From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:

The Benghazi Hearings: No Showboating, Please

Dear Republicans on the House Oversight Committee:

Please do not grandstand. Please do not take the time before the television cameras to tell us how outraged you are, even though what you are investigating is, indeed, outrageous. There will be plenty of time for that after the hearing. All day Wednesday, give us the facts, and then more facts, and then more facts.

Just ask the questions of the witnesses. Let them speak and don’t cut them off. Do not give the Obama administration any cover to claim that this is a partisan witch hunt from unhinged political opponents. Don’t waste time complaining about the media’s lack of interest or coverage so far. Just give them — and us — the facts to tell the story, a story that will leave all of us demanding accountability.

Sheryl Attkisson’s excellent reporting for CBS gives us a sense of what to expect, with three big issues.

First: Leading up to September 11, why did the State Department keep reducing the amount of security protecting diplomatic staff in Libya, in light of the increasingly dire requests from those in country?

The former deputy chief of mission for the U.S. in Libya, Gregory Hicks was interviewed by congressional investigators on the House Oversight Committee in April. He told them, “We had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability to the bare minimum.”

Second: Precisely what happened that night? Was there a time when a rescue could have been authorized, but wasn’t? Were any forces told to “stand down” and not attempt a rescue?

From Hicks’s interview:

A: So Lieutenant Colonel Gibson, who is the SOCAFRICA commander, his team, you know, they were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C-130 when he got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, you can’t go now, you don’t have authority to go now. And so they missed the flight. And, of course, this meant that one of the . . .

Q : They didn’t miss the flight. They were told not to board the flight.

A: They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it. So, anyway, and yeah. I still remember Colonel Gibson, he said, “I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.” A nice compliment.

Wait, there’s more from another witness:

On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department’s own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a “whistle-blower” witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Third, what happened afterwards, and was there an effort to lie to the American people about what happened?

Hicks, again:

Greg Hicks: . . . The net impact of what has transpired is the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world has basically said that the President of Libya is either a liar or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The impact of that is immeasurable. Magariaf has just lost face in front of not only his own people, but the world . . . my jaw hit the floor as I watched this . . . I’ve never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career as on that day . . . I never reported a demonstration; I reported an attack on the consulate. Chris’s last report, if you want to say his final report, is, “Greg, we are under attack.” . . . It is jaw-dropping that — to me that — how that came to be.

Finally, did the previous efforts to investigate this amount to a cover-up?

Jed Babbin:

Last week, we learned that the State Department’s Inspector General is investigating the Pickering-Mullen “Accountability Review Board” for, among other things, its failure to investigate and get statements from the Benghazi survivors. Before there were whistleblowers there were survivors, yet the comprehensively misnamed “Accountability Review Board” didn’t question them.

Which isn’t a surprise. The ARB did what it was paid to do: limit the damage and blame people under Hillary Clinton for the failures of leadership and management. It was, simply, a whitewash. We’ll probably wait a long time for the IG to report the facts — 2017 sounds like the right time frame.

In the press conference announcing the report, Adm. Mullen said something that’s been bothering me ever since. He said that no military assets could have been deployed in time. In time to do what?

Jed makes a good point here: Just how did the U.S. military and diplomatic folks outside of Benghazi know how long they had to rescue anyone? How did they know how long our guys would be able to hold out, or how long the attack would go on? After the fact, you can calculate that not enough forces could have reached the site in time, but how did they know that as the events were ongoing?

If that means, in Clintonian terms, that they wouldn’t have been in time to save Ambassador Chris Stevens, that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have been in time to save the SEALs.

If you parse Mullen’s words — as we learned we must when Hillary’s hubby was president — he almost certainly meant that the ambassador was killed in the early moments of the attack.

In short, what we don’t need is a bold, expectation-setting, agenda-hinting prediction like this:

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said on his radio show Monday that President Obama “will not fill out his full term” because he was complicit in a “cover-up” surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.

“I believe that before it’s all over, this president will not fill out his full term,” Huckabee said. “I know that puts me on a limb, but this is not minor.”

Tags: Benghazi

Mark Sanford's 10-Event Campaigning Days

By Jim Geraghty

May 6, 2013 2:37 PM

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4

If Mark Sanford succeeds in his improbable comeback tomorrow, a lot of people will be asking, “How did he do it?” A serious answer will be: “He just outworked his opponent.”

Earlier today, Dave Weigel tweeted, “Sanford has 5 campaign stops today — one avail already — before Colbert Busch’s first event.” Sanford has eleven public events scheduled today; Colbert Busch has five.

The week of April 22, he did 15 public events. She did six in those five days, according to her campaign’s web site. He did three public events Wednesday; she did one. He did three public events Thursday; she did none. He did ten events public Saturday, she did five.

He did take Sunday off; she did three events that day.

Sanford’s campaign just announced he’s doing 10 events tomorrow, before his Election Night party:

7:45 AM — Pages Okra Grill, 302 Coleman Blvd, Mt. Pleasant

8:30 AM — Huddle House, 261 Johnnie Dodds Blvd., Mt. Pleasant

9:15 AM — Brown’s Court Bakery, 199 St. Philip Street, Charleston

10 AM — Vote — 75 Calhoun Street, Charleston

11 AM — Pep Boys, 1550 Savannah Highway, West Ashley, Charleston

11:45 AM — Moe’s Southwest Grill, 1812 Sam Rittenberg Blvd., West Ashley, Charleston

12:45 PM — Cookout Restaurant, 8968 University Blvd., North Charleston 29406

1:30PM — Alex’s Restaurant, 309 St. James Avenue, Goose Creek

2:30 PM — Piggly Wiggly, 9616 Highway 78, Suite 1, Ladson

4 PM — Farmer’s Market Mt. Pleasant, Moultrie Middle School, 645 Coleman Boulevard, Mt. Pleasant

7:30 PM — Watch Party — Liberty Tap Room & Grill, 1028 Johnnie Dodds Blvd., Mt. Pleasant

A busy campaign schedule can’t completely change the dynamics of a race, but it certainly can’t hurt, as long as the candidate can keep the energy and enthusiasm up.

Tags: Mark Sanford , Elizabeth Colbert Busch

Colbert Busch: My Vote for Next Speaker Is ‘A Hypothetical’

By Jim Geraghty

May 6, 2013 12:06 PM

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13

The editorial board of the Hilton Head, S.C., Island Packet asked Elizabeth Colbert Busch why she ran as a Democrat.

She answered for several minutes, beginning with seeing an “incredible-looking” John Kennedy drive by in a black Lincoln Continental with the top down in 1960 when she was six years old, and how Jackie Kennedy was “such a fierce mother, protecting her children.”

“I’ve always just felt that I was a Democrat — although a fiscally conservative Democrat.”

Her answer didn’t mention President Obama, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, assistant House minority leader and South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, or any other modern Democratic leader.

Some might argue that today’s Democratic party has a quite different worldview and agenda than the 1960-era John F. Kennedy version.

Asked whether she would vote for Nancy Pelosi to be speaker, Colbert Busch responds, ”I wouldn’t even be able to vote until 2015. I don’t know who’s going to be on that ballot. Nobody knows who’s going to be on that ballot. But who I will vote for is the person who will be on the ballot. It’s not until 2015 anyway, so it’s kind of a hypothetical question.”

Tags: Elizabeth Colbert Busch

Terry McAuliffe, True Believer in the 1980 ‘October Surprise’ Conspiracy Theory

By Jim Geraghty

May 6, 2013 10:37 AM

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3

Terry McAuliffe strongly believes that Ronald Reagan’s campaign conspired with the Iranian ayatollahs to prevent the release of the hostages in 1980:

Reagan’s Inauguration hit us all like a kick in the gut, and not just for the obvious reasons. President Carter was racing the clock trying to free the hostages before Reagan was inaugurated, and it didn’t look as if he would make it. Then Inauguration Day came and exactly five minutes after Reagan was sworn in, the U.S. hostages were finally released after 444 days in captivity. A former National Security Council (NSC) staffer named Gary Sick spent years investigating and put together a strong case that a deal had occurred between Reagan’s people and the Iranians to sway the elections by delaying the release of the hostages — and in return for helping Reagan, the Iranians would be rewarded with weapons shipments from Israel.

Let me tell you why I’m sure the Reagan people had a hand in this. First of all, the arms transfers from Israel to Iran began almost immediately after Reagan became president. Second, the main defense of the Reagan people was that it would have been too terrible a crime for Reagan to cook up secret deals with the Iranians in violation of U.S. law, but that is just what the Reagan administration did when it sold arms to the Iranians and used the profits to illegally fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Finally, the key to Reagan’s deal on the Iranian hostages was Bill Casey, a swashbuckling Cold War spy master who served Reagan as campaign manager and CIA Director. Sick’s sources told him that Casey met with the Iranians in a Madrid hotel in July 1980 and again several months later, and made the deal.

— What a Party! pp. 35–36

The first advocate of the “October Surprise” theory was Lyndon LaRouche.

The Israeli-arms-to-Iran deal beginning in 1981 described by McAuliffe was Operation Seashell, an Israeli operation designed to prevent Iran from losing to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, not an American operation. French and Portuguese arms dealers were the intermediaries, not American ones.

Daniel Pipes pointed out that Sick used the “I refused to believe this theory until recently” line in 1991, while publicly espousing it in 1988.

The House of Representatives formed a special task force to invesigate the “October Surprise,” spending $1.3 million and looking at the issue for ten months, looking at tens of thousands of documents, conducting more than 230 formal interviews in ten countries. Indiana representative Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, chaired the task force and concluded that it “found no truth to the accusations that members of the Reagan presidential campaign conspired in 1980 to delay the release of the American hostages in Iran until after the November election.”

Hamilton:

The overall conclusion of the task force is that there is no credible evidence to support the central October Surprise allegations. We found, first, wholly insufficient evidence that officials of the Reagan presidential campaign secretly met with Iranian officials in 1980; no credible evidence that members of the Reagan presidential campaign conspired to delay the release of the hostages;a and no credible evidence that the Reagan administration provided directly, or indirectly through Israel, arms in exchange for a delay in the release of the hostages.

The task force concluded that “nearly all of the individuals claiming firsthand knowledge of the October Surprise allegations were either wholesale fabricators or were impeached by documentary evidence.”

Finally, Newsweek back in 1991:

NEWSWEEK has found, after a long investigation including interviews with government officials and other knowledgeable sources around the world, that the key claims of the purported eyewitnesses and accusers simply do not hold up. What the evidence does show is the murky history of a conspiracy theory run wild.

Casey’s whereabouts during the July “window” are convincingly established by contemporary records at the Imperial War Museum in London. Casey, it turns out, took a three-day breather from the campaign to participate in the Anglo-American Conference on the History of the Second World War. As a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services — the forerunner of the CIA — Casey delivered a paper on OSS operations in Europe during the war. He went to a reception for conference participants on the evening of July 28, and he was photographed there. He delivered his paper on the morning of July 29.

ABC News acknowledged these facts in an update later in June — but still maintained that Casey had enough time on July 27 and 28 to fly to Madrid to meet with the Iranians. A close examination of the conference records by NEWSWEEK, however, demonstrates that Casey in fact was present at the conference sessions in London on July 28. Historian Jonathan Chadwick, who organized the conference, kept a precise, day-by-day and session-by-session record of who was present and who was not. According to Chadwick’s records, Casey was present at 9:30 a.m on the 28th, stayed for the second morning session, leaving after lunch and returning at 4 p.m.

The truth is out there, Terry. Maybe the cigarette-smoking man got to everyone else!

Tags: Terry McAuliffe

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