[Vision2020] Follow The Money

[Art Deco]

*The New Yorker*:
 September 27, 2012
Larry McCarthy, the Missing Link?
Posted by Jane Mayer<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/jane_mayer/search?contributorName=Jane%20Mayer>

[image: larry-mccarthy.jpg]

On Tuesday, the New York *Times* ran a
story<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/us/politics/conservative-super-pacs-sharpen-their-synchronized-message.html?pagewanted=all>about
how synchronized the anti-Obama messages in unrelated television
commercials seem to be, despite being aired by a variety of ostensibly
independent, conservative political groups involved in the 2012
Presidential campaign. “To see many of the anti-Obama ads that have run on
television recently, it would be easy to conclude that they were made in
the same studios, by the same producers working for the same campaign,”
Jeremy W. Peters wrote.

New Federal Election Commission filings reveal a reason why the ads are so
alike in style and substance: they do, in fact have a production firm in
common. Guiding some fifty million dollars’ worth of anti-Obama television
ads that ran in August and early September, sponsored by three major
separate conservative groups, is the hand of Larry McCarthy.

McCarthy, whom I profiled for the
magazine<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/13/120213fa_fact_mayer>,
is best known for the notoriously race-baiting Willie Horton ad he made in
1988 that helped annihilate Michael Dukakis’s chances. Floyd Brown, a
conservative Republican operative, described McCarthy to me as the Party’s
“secret weapon.” The Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who has known McCarthy
for years, went one step further, saying of McCarthy, “If you want an
assassination, you hire one of the best marksmen in history.”

Recent F.E.C. filings show that McCarthy’s tiny Washington, D.C.,-based
firm, McCarthy Hennings Media Inc., has been simultaneously involved in
producing anti-Obama ads for Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, a
nonprofit “social welfare” group masterminded by the Republican political
operative Karl Rove; the separate nonprofit “social welfare” group
Americans for Prosperity, co-founded and partly funded by the conservative
industrialists Charles and David Koch; and Restore Our Future, the main
pro-Romney Super PAC. The filings show that during August and the beginning
of September, McCarthy’s firm is identified as the “media production”
company for $21.8 million worth of ad buys by Americans for Prosperity, a
$21.7 million worth of ad buys for Restore Our Future, and $7. 1 million
worth of ad buys for Crossroads GPS. Cumulatively, as the *Times* reported,
these outside ads have filled huge gaps for Romney’s campaign, not just
supplementing his campaign’s ad buys but at times outspending them.

Legally, there is no prohibition against such outside groups coördinating
with each other so long as none of them coördinates directly with the
candidate or his campaign. Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads,
told me, “It’s commonplace for groups to use multiple media producers, and
for producers to have multiple groups as clients. Outside groups on the
right have been coördinating since 2010.” He noted that “Crossroads uses
McCarthy because he’s one of the very best media guys out there.” But the
similarity of message, and the overlapping personnel behind these various
outside groups, demonstrates how centralized the conservative outside-money
machine has become.

Several of McCarthy’s ads have featured variations on the theme of buyer’s
remorse suffered by voters who supported Obama in 2008 and have since
turned on him. A McCarthy ad for Crossroads, for instance, featured an
unidentified mother ruing her vote because her children were still home—now
as adults without jobs. Another, for Americans for Prosperity, features
three unidentified voters—two women and a man—who all say they still
believe in “hope and change” but not from Obama.

It’s a theme consistent with candid remarks that Rove made to big
Republican supporters at what he thought was a private meeting during the
Republican Convention last month, but which were reported on by *Bloomberg
Businessweek*<http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-31/exclusive-inside-karl-roves-billionaire-fundraiser>.
During that session, he explained that extensive polling and focus-group
testing had made clear that “the people we’ve got to win in this election,
by and large, voted for Barack Obama.” To win them over, he said, it was
less effective to attack Obama headlong than to describe him more
sympathetically as disappointing, particularly on the economy. “If you say
he’s a socialist, they’ll go to defend him. If you call him a ‘far out
left-winger,’ they’ll say, ‘no, no, he’s not.’ ” Instead, Rove said, “If
you keep it focused on the facts and adopt a respectful tone, then they’re
gonna agree with you.” Romney made a similar point himself, during another
candid session that he too thought was private, with donors in Boca Raton,
Florida, but which was surreptitiously taped, and leaked to *Mother Jones*.

McCarthy’s advertising work for the Koch-linked group Americans for
Prosperity, which was not widely known, is newly visible thanks to a
short-lived legal anomaly. For most of this year, non-profit groups airing
issue ads, even those that harshly criticized opponents by name, claimed
they did not have to disclose who funded them, or much of anything else, to
the F.E.C. But in March, Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen won a
ruling against the F.E.C. saying that the secretive funders of such issue
ads at least had to disclose details of their ad buys. The new F.E.C. rules
with this requirement went into effect on July 28th. Fifty-three days
later, the legal decision was reversed on appeal. But those fifty-three
days of disclosure provide a fascinating glimpse, during which outside
groups mentioning a federal candidate by name had to disclose the amount
and nature of their ad spending to the F.E.C. It is those filings that
reveal that all three major anti-Obama outside groups are relying on
McCarthy’s firm, regarded as one of the toughest hardball players in the
business, to craft their message, including the one linked to the Kochs.

According to the Sunlight
Foundation<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/09/25/dark-money-organizations-change-strategies-to-keep-donors-secret/>,
which tracks campaign-spending reports closely, “During the fifty-three
days where the decision was in effect, the American Future Fund spent $2.8
million, while the Chamber of Commerce, a 501(c)6 trade association, put in
a pretty $12.7 million. Crossroads GPS spent almost $15 million in this
period, but Americans for Prosperity took the cake with a whopping $30.8
million in independent expenditures.”

As Rove acknowledged during the private session captured by *Bloomberg
Businessweek*, “As many of you know, one of the most important things about
Crossroads is: We don’t try and do this alone. We have partners.”

*Illustration by Jimmy Turrell.*
To get more of *The New Yorker*'s signature mix of politics, culture and
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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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