Fool Me Twice (24 page)

• KYC/PYC's campaign manager is Tanya Bjork, who most recently served as director of federal affairs for Governor Jim Doyle. Bjork “managed the state's federal priorities” and served as the Doyle administration's “chief liaison with the White House, federal agencies, Congress and other governors.”
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Bjork also served as the Wisconsin state director for the Obama campaign, regional director for EMILY's List, regional political director for the AFL-CIO, and as a senior campaign staff member for the late senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and former senator Russ Feingold (D-WI).
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• Senior advisor Paul Tewes is a partner in political consulting firm New Partners. Additionally, Tewes and his partner, Steve Hildebrand, President Obama's deputy campaign manager, operate the Washington, D.C.–based political campaign consulting firm Tewes-Hildebrand. Both are considered among Obama's top advisors.
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Tewes worked as coordinated campaign director in 2001–2002 at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and as its political director in 2003–2004. Eventually, he became political director of the DSCC before moving on to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.
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Tewes was Obama's state director for the Iowa caucuses, where Tewes and his team “built the largest grassroots organization in history, culminating in a win that launched Obama's historic campaign.” Obama later appointed him as head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
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• KYC/PYC's finance adviser is Ami Copeland, also a partner in New Partners.
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Copeland “managed and helped build the most successful political fundraising operation in history” as deputy national finance director for Obama's presidential campaign during the primary and as senior finance adviser to the DNC.
³²

Previously, in 2001–2002, Copeland worked as a political fundraiser for the successful reelection campaign for Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IO). In 2003, Copeland raised contributions as the
Midwest regional finance director for the DSCC, after which he was recruited by former majority leader Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SC), as his deputy national finance director for his reelection campaign, 2003–2004, and by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) as his finance director in his successful reelection campaign, 2005–2006.
³³

• KYC/PYC's original communications director was Eddie P. Vale, who worked for the AFL-CIO as political communications director. Previously, in the 2008 campaign cycle, Vale served as communications director for the IE group, Progressive Media USA, and for John Edwards's presidential campaign in New Hampshire.
³⁴

Vale told the
Boston Globe
in April 2011 that PYC did not have to disclose its donors. Both groups, he said, could “run television and radio ads in key races, as well as send out mailings and make phone calls to voters.” At the time, an “official involved in the groups” told the
Globe
a combined $5 million had been raised to date.
³⁵

Sam Stein noted in the
Huffington Post
: “How the organizations will structure their operations or spend their money isn't entirely clear. Officials at the launch were coy with strategy and plans, stressing only that Know Your Care/Protect Your Care will be informative in nature, will be active in races and will work through the 2012 election until the major components of the law are implemented in 2014.”
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• In September 2011, Darden Rice moved up from communications director at Progress Florida for KYC/PYC to become the groups' new communications director. At the time, KYC/PYC were in Orlando, protesting “threatened cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”
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A well-known Florida political figure, Rice was president of the League of Women Voters in the St. Petersburg area, and previously served as national field coordinator for the Sierra Club's Cool Cities Campaign and as the Florida-based representative at the Sierra Club.
³⁸

• Jim Margolis, a senior adviser to Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign, is a KYC/PYC media consultant. Currently, Margolis not only represents Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), but also “more Democratic senators than any other consultant in the
nation.”
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A senior partner at GMMB, a Washington-based political consulting, advertising, and communications firm, Margolis was a key strategist in Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.
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• David DiMartino, a partner at Blue Line Strategic Communications, is a communications adviser for the groups. He held senior communications positions in national campaign organizations, including the DSCC in 1999–2000 and for the 2003–2004 presidential primary for Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). He also served on Kerry's staff.
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• John Anzalone, a partner at Anzalone-Liszt Research, is KYC/PYC's pollster. In 2008, Anzalone “helped build a firm that helped elect Barack Obama as President.”
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Anzalone conducted polling during the health care and financial reform debates for the Common Purpose Project, HCAN, and Americans United for Change. He “works regularly with the DCCC, DSCC and the DGA on their candidate recruitment and independent expenditure programs.”
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Leading political reporter Ben Smith, then at
Politico
, reported in April 2009 that the Common Purpose Project was meeting quietly every Tuesday afternoon at the Capitol Hilton, bringing together “top officials from a range of left-leaning organizations, from labor groups like Change to Win to activists like MoveOn.org, all in support of the White House's agenda.” The group's membership overlapped, Smith wrote, with “a daily 8:45 a.m. call run by the Center for American Progress' and Media Matters' political arms; with the new field-oriented coalition Unity '09; and with the groups that allied to back the budget as the Campaign to Rebuild and Renew America Now.”

The Common Purpose Project was founded by political consultant Erik Smith. CPP differed from other groups in one major respect: White House communications director Ellen Moran was included in its meetings, Smith reported. One of Smith's sources stated that the meetings provided a “way for the White House to manage its relationships with some of these independent groups.”
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The innocuous-sounding official CPP description is that it is a 501(c) (4) “founded to bring together progressive leaders and organizations in an
effort to collaborate on effective public policy messaging.”
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The majority of CPP's board members were connected to the 2008 Obama for America campaign.
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Each of these individuals is a member of the KYC/PYC advisory board. There are yet still more members to the team, and we discuss them below. First, however, we will take a look at some of the tactics progressives have employed (and will continue using) to salvage ObamaCare from the jaws of possible defeat—or, in that eventuality, to push with all of their considerable resources for an alternate single-payer health care plan.

While KYC/PYC was announcing its launch in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 2011, the campaign to defend ObamaCare hit the airwaves in Iowa with a commercial defending it as “a boon to small business.”
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Spokesman Eddie Vale said the groups' “five-figure television buy” was “accompanied by ‘saturation'-level online ads in Des Moines [and] Ames.” The ad featured a “small businessman explaining that ‘there's plenty to worry about when you own a small business,' including ‘paying for health insurance.' “The messaging shifted the focus to jobs creation. Vale explained that the ad “builds on our educational efforts around the Affordable Care Act and expands the case that it's not just about health care, it's also about jobs.”

The following month, the PYC website compared ObamaCare to Mitt Romney's health care plan. A graphic prepared by the Center for American Progress claimed: “Romney's health care plan in Massachusetts was good policy and an important foundation for the Affordable Care Act. The key to success for both is the inclusion of an individual responsibility provision.”
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On July 13, 2011, the day of the first official Republican debate in Manchester, Nwe Hampshire., PYC launched its first television ad on ABC local WMUR and in the Boston area, as well as online ads. Also, “visibility around town and at the debate” was accompanied by “rapid response and fact checking' on both ObamaCare and Romneycare.
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The group ran its biggest Internet advertising to date, including a “Google blast” in Manchester and ads run on mobile phones for people on St. Anselm's college campus, where the debate was held, and via Google searches. Also, PYC
did “visibilities” in Manchester and at the debate with signs proclaiming “Hands Off My Medicare,” “Hands Off My Medicaid,” as well as ones “thanking Mitt Romney for his health care plan.” (Note that similar signs were carried by demonstrators March 26–28, 2012, outside the Supreme Court building in Washington.)

Immediately after the September 12, 2011, so-called Tea Party GOP presidential debate, PYC carried on as though it had hit the $100 million lottery. Sam Stein gave an abbreviated account of the chain of events at the
Huffington Post
:

A bit of a startling moment happened near the end of Monday night's CNN debate when a hypothetical question was posed to Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).

“What do you tell a guy who is sick, goes into a coma and doesn't have health insurance? Who pays for his coverage? Are you saying society should just let him die?” Wolf Blitzer asked.

“Yeah!” several members of the crowd yelled out.

“Paul interjected to offer an explanation for how this was, more-or-less, the root choice of a free society. He added that communities and non-government institutions can fill the void that the public sector is currently playing.

“We never turned anybody away from the hospital,” he said of his volunteer work for churches and his career as a doctor. “We have given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves, assume responsibility for ourselves … that's the reason the cost is so high.”
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Eddie Vale immediately went into full propaganda mode, telling the
Los Angeles Times
, “The moment offered ‘a disturbing view into the Tea Party's extreme right-wing position on health care when members of the audience clapped and cheered the idea of letting someone without health insurance die.' Even worse,” Vale continued, “none of the Republican candidates on stage expressed a word of disapproval as the Tea Party audience literally clapped for blood. This was a spectacle one would have expected back in the gladiatorial combat of ancient Rome, not at a presidential debate.'”
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Michael Muskal, writing at the
Los Angeles Times
, provided a different
version of the exchange between Blitzer and Paul, which makes clear that it was Blitzer who kept pushing until he got his
gotcha
moment. Mukasy, however, was just as guilty of skewing his own report. Right before reporting Vale's comment, Mukasy inserted: “Still, that some in the audience were willing to let people die became a symptom of the conservatives' disregard for people, at least as far as progressives are concerned.”
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This is a good example of how progressive messaging is predictably exploited by the compliant news media.

Stein reported at the
Huffington Post
that PYC had already launched a new website with a riff on
Let him die?
The LetHimDie.com website asked visitors: “Who will the Republican candidates listen to? The Tea Party or the American people? Watch our ad on the Tea Party's cheering and applauding for letting an uninsured man die.”
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On September 14, Vale told the
Boston Globe
that PYC was expending $5,000 to test its ads that day and expected to spend between $10,000 and $15,000 for Google ads online, as well as in the early voting states of New Hampshire, Iowa, and Florida, that would run nationwide until the next presidential debate the following week. The total cost, according to Vale, would “depend on how many people click on the ads.” Additionally, Vale said PYC was launching an online petition linked to the ads, “urging the Republican candidates to condemn the cheering.”
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In opposition to the PYC campaign, in a September 16 column at
USA Today
, Katrina Trinko complained:

As no fan of ObamaCare, I apparently want to see the streets littered with the dead bodies of the uninsured … Never mind that the Tea Party mob consisted of two or three loudmouthed jerks in an audience of over a thousand. [Nor is it such a remote possibility that the yellers might actually have been progressive plants.—Ed.]

The disagreement between liberals and conservatives isn't about whether to save the man's life, but how to save his life. Liberals see the ideal solution as government-funded (and mandated) insurance for all, while conservatives see the best way as encouraging personal responsibility, and if that falls through, bringing together family, community, and generous donors to pay the bills.
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Also let us note that PYC's website, LetHimDie.com, was actually a joint project with Americans United for Change (AUFC), a group heavily involved in Obama's 2008 campaign. According to
Discover the Networks
, AUFC was founded in 2005 to “fend off” President George W. Bush's “top policy priority at the time: privatizing Social Security.” AUFC later advocated for the usual socialist platform, including allowing Medicare to directly negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs and “improving access to affordable healthcare for all Americans [by means of government-controlled, socialized medicine, that is].”
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While claiming to be a “non-partisan” organization,
DTN
wrote, AUFC's “agendas are entirely consistent with, and supportive of, those of the Democratic Party.” In fact, FactCheck.org reported in October 2011 that the AUFC message “closely mirror[ed] that of the Obama White House.”
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In 2009, AUFC, with the financial support of MoveOn.org, SEIU, and AFSCME, backed an advertising campaign to support Obama's massive “stimulus” bill.
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