McCAIN’S CHARLIE BLACK: the Republican’s Isaiah Thomas...Highly Paid as Serial Loser.
There is no more complete example of Republican party incompetence than long time strategist Charlie Black. Manifest in just this one feckless man is pretty much everything that is wrong with the GOP establishment apparatus. So naturally, he is a high level executive in the McCain campaign.
This weekend, as we stand on the precipice of what could be and should be a key event of the 2008 election (the de-frocking of Saint Obama the Vacuous), Black and the McCain camp stand poised to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It is once again left to the uneasy marriage of the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” and Clinton, Inc to do the dirty work needed to salvage the republic. (Did I just say that?)
Black, when questioned on MSNBC about the issue of Barack Obama and Pastor Jeremiah Wright, goes out of his way to answer out of context and do so in favor of the opposition by saying “the candidates cannot be held accountable for all the views of people who endorse them or befriend them.”
Which of course did the Democrats job for them by confirming that in Black’s mind there is no difference between McCain’s relationship with John Hagee and the Obama-Wright relationship. But not satisfied with that, he once again twisted reality in favor of his opponent by adding “fortunately…Senator Obama has repudiated these very unusual views.” Well, actually, Obama had not done so at this time and more to the point, these are not very unusual views. These are the consistent views of over 35 years of hate and vitriole…including the minor detail of the 20 years Obama was a big supporter. These details are not even lost on liberal whiner Juan Williams, who gets it on this issue far better than Black.
It is one thing to stay above the fray and allow your opponent to destroy himself. It’s another altogether to provide his talking points. But this is the Charlie Black Democrats have come to know and love.
This tepid non-warrior was simply being himself. It’s how he’s always acted. It’s why his political W-L record looks like that of a Duke football coach. “I think he would just as soon run a polite campaign and lose than run a tough campaign and win” said a long time GOP operative familiar with Black “so he can maintain credibility with his media and other Washington buddies.”
I asked my source, who demanded that he/she remain anonymous because Black could hurt their career, where the rumor got started that Black was any good at this? “He likes to take credit for getting Jesse Helms started” was the reply. “He always goes back to that. Other than that, I don’t really know.” This is of course ridiculous, as Helms clearly set his own tone and ran campaigns totally the opposite of the Charlie Black diluted style.
Jesse ran hard. Jesse had no public charisma. Jesse never was ahead in a poll. Jesse never lost an election. And then he governed consistent with how he ran. Jesse won with his “Jesse-crats” who much like “Reagan Democrats” were not swayed by pseudo-moderates. They were attracted by the pragmatism of unapologetic conservatism. Reagan got that across with his fabulously genuine persona. Jesse did so with a hammer of a political machine. If Black had anything to do with Helm’s successes, which I doubt, he certainly failed to learn from the experience.
More recently, Black has been a chief architect of the 1992 George HW Bush campaign. That was the pusillanimous campaign that netted the lowest percentage of the vote of any incumbent in American History. Black was chief spokesman of the RNC in the early1990s, setting the strategy that totally eroded the post Desert Storm 90% Republican approval ratings and set up his disaster of 92. He was a chief operative in another of history’s worst efforts, the Dole-Kemp effort of 1996. He had little to do in the elections of 2000 and 2004, ironically wining GOP efforts. He keeps losing, and he keeps getting high paid gigs. He is the Republicans’ Isaiah Thomas.
So Black continues to make a personal fortune while ruining the Republican Party and separting the party from its base even further. And why not. Black is a lawyer and a lobbyist. His wife is a lobbyist. He owns a huge lobbying firm (BKSH & Associates). If his credentials sound familiar, they are nearly identical to those of the last two Democrat Senate Majority Leaders’. They have nothing in comon with conservative Americans.
This adds up to a vested interest in losing politely. More so than winning tough. And it gets worse. His firm is a subsidiary of Burson-Marstellar, a firm whose CEO is Democrat Strategist Mark Penn. Penn, you might remember, is the Michael Moore look-a-like who took about 15 million from Hillary’s campaign to run their brilliant January strategy.
Charlie Black IS the Republican Party’s problem manifest. He is weak. He is a loser who personally wins by us losing. He is a lobbyist. He is entangled finanically with the most partisan of liberals. A socialist Obama administration would be positioned to funnel billions to some of Black’s lobbying clients and those of Mark Penn’s firm. He is simultaneously an ineffective warrior who is legitimately a target of liberal demagogery…and doesn’t do McCain a helluva lot of good on the lobbying issue. So he fights with kid gloves so he will be forgiven when the battle is over.
And we wonder sometimes out hear in the real world why our leaders in D.C. are so ineffective and unwilling to fight. It’s because they win when we lose. About time to move the RNC offices out of D.C., isn’t it?