Nice RNC Work If You Can Get It
In early March, Republican National Committee finance chief
Rob Bickhart became the poster boy for all that
was wrong with the RNC led by former Maryland Lt. Gov.
Michael Steele, when it was revealed that he had
been paid at least $370,000 by the RNC since last June in salary
and consulting fees.
Many RNC members assumed that Bickhart was working at the RNC
for a salary, but not one that included substantial fees for the
fundraising he was doing for the party. Prior to his RNC post,
Bickhart’s most high-profile job was raising funds for Sen.
Rick Santorum’s failed 2006 Senate re-elect.
Bickhart’s bad week in March started when Politico reported that
the lead RNC fundraiser had done an amateurish strategy PowerPoint
presentation at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida, in
February, and told RNC officials and donors to use “fear” of
President Barack Obama to fundraise for the party.
The presentation showed images of Obama as the Joker, House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi as Cruella DeVille, and Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid as Scooby Doo.
“[The presentation] was an embarrassment and Bickhart’s salary
is outrageous,” says a state party chairman, who was shown the
presentation after the fact by another RNC official. “He represents
everything that is wrong with the RNC right now.”
At press time, Bickhart was still on the job, though RNC
officials said that Steele was under intense pressure to fire him.
Bickhart, according to these officials, was not even Steele’s third
choice for finance chief, but because the chairman had such
difficulty finding a qualified fundraiser for the lead job, he
ended up having to overpay.
Bickhart was only the latest embarrassment for Steele, who
earlier took heat for hosting the party’s winter meeting in Hawaii,
for using RNC resources to promote his book on how Republicans can
make a comeback, and for running up exorbitant expenses over the
first year of his tenure as chairman. On at least two occasions,
rumors have swirled inside RNC headquarters that Steele was in
danger of losing his job, but, in part thanks to being able to
fundraise off the extremism coming out of the Obama White House and
Congress, the party has been able to increase its fundraising.
It isn’t just fundraisers who are getting paid big bucks over at
the RNC. With the importance of online fundraising and social
networking, new media consultants are also said to be earning
$10,000 to $15,000 a month in fees from the national party.
Overconfidence?
Owing to his personality, energy, and conservative values,
Florida Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio
has become one of the darlings of the conservative movement for
2010’s election cycle, particularly when held up against his
competitor for the nomination, moderate Gov. Charlie
Crist.
But some conservatives in Florida think Rubio, who has seen his
fundraising and endorsements increase as more conservatives from
around the country have rallied to him, could be doing a better job
campaigning.
“My concern is that he’s taking some things for granted,” says a
longtime Republican operative in Florida. “He’s not working the
churches and community centers and some of the grassroots the way a
hungry young politician should.”
Further fueling the concerns were Rubio’s confident discussions
with some conservatives in Washington, where he talked about which
Senate committees he expected he’d be assigned upon winning the
Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Mel
Martinez.
Legal Services Inc.
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee want staff to look
into the operations of the Department of Justice’s National
Security Division, which houses the little-known Law and Policy
Office. The NSD, parts of which had previously resided inside the
Criminal Division, also houses an Office of Intelligence Policy and
Review.
“For a number of lawyers looking to influence anti-terrorism
policy, this was the office to get into,” says a current Justice
political appointee. “But it’s comparatively a small staff, and
most of us have no interaction with them, given the security issues
they deal with.”
A great deal of focus is now on the NSD, in part because of Sen.
Chuck Grassley’s requests for the names and
positions of all Obama Department of Justice attorneys who prior to
joining the administration worked directly or indirectly for
suspected terrorists or enemy combatants.
One of those names was Jennifer Daskal, who is
now a staffer on the NSD and who served as a senior counsel for
Human Rights Watch before joining the administration. Daskal was
involved in a number of lawsuits on behalf of enemy combatants and
terrorists held in offshore secure facilities.
“Very little is known about the NSD, who works there, and how
they operate within the department,” says a Republican Senate
Judiciary staffer. “It’s a relatively new operation, so it’s time
to start looking at what it does.”
Borderline Politics
Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate are shocked that
the White House Office of Legislative Affairs is encouraging
Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer and Republican Sen.
Lindsey Graham to develop the legislative
blueprint for an immigration reform bill, which the administration
might ask Congress to take up later this year.
“The White House has managed to kill the congressional careers
of perhaps as many as 50 Democrats, and now it wants a few more
scalps for the fall election cycle?” says one Democratic House
member. “None of us wants to touch another hot-button issue until
January 2011.”
Netflits
In February, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton made a speech in Washington about the need to
ensure freedom reigned on the Internet. At the time, the speech was
viewed as a broadside against the governments of Iran and China,
which had been heavily censoring online activities.
That may have been the case, but now officials at the State
Department are looking at global treaty models that could be used
for a kind of “Internet Free Speech Treaty,” which would give an
institution like the United Nations some role in monitoring
governments’ censoring activities of the Internet.
“It’s just another example of how far this administration wants
to go to get government involved in the Internet,” says a former
Bush administration official who worked on Internet issues at the
Department of Commerce. “The United States invented the Internet,
we’ve managed it, and it’s worked just fine. There is no need to
hand it over to the UN so it can screw it up
