ON THE PROWL
“As the months pass, Ashcroft is looking Honest John Some conservatives who are sitting out this presidential cycle, and who still hope to make a dent politically at the 2008...
...Rather, the funds would be privately raised and doled out by the politically active PAC members tied together by their involvement with CPB and PBS...
...I looked into it and couldn’t find a source inside the campaign to confirm it,” says a national political reporter who was in Iowa traveling with the Romney campaign...
...political junkies have is what could a person’s motivation be to leak that kind of rumor from inside the campaign...
...On the weekend before the caucus he was at 14 and o n T H e P R o W L trending up and perhaps had the best ground game going...
...The political contributions would not come from taxpayer dollars...
...Senator and Attorney General John Ashcroft as an option for either vice president or an honest broker in negotiating a brokered convention...
...This is a natural offshoot of the lobbying and the work we do directly for PBS and CPB...
...sandbagged Could Fred Thompson’s campaign have been robbed of a more decisive outcome in Iowa by a political dirty trick and a mole from another campaign...
...The difference, of course, is that CPB and PBS are largely creations of taxpayer-funding, and the private money spent by these PACs will be spent to ensure more taxpayer money goes to PBS and CPB...
...Steve King of Iowa, who was traveling with Thompson at the time, internal polling from other campaigns showed Thompson at 18 points with two days to go before the caucus, “And he was going up in some parts of the state,” says the King adviser...
...He has not indicated any desire to return to politics, though his name continues to pop up, particularly in areas related to the ongoing war against radical Islamic terrorists...
...One Republican leader who has done just as good a job is former House Speaker tors Rick Tyler and Rich Galen with two upstart campaigns, Mike Huckabee’s and Fred Thompson’s, respectively...
...Some long-time Reagan supporters might quibble with that description, given Ashcroft’s decision not to support Reagan’s 1 4 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 o n T H e P R o W L 1976 pursuit of the Republican nomination, but not by much...
...And both campaigns have at times seemingly stumbled...
...But according to reporters in Iowa and Washington, one campaign continued to push the story hard: the McCain camp...
...Pbs Means Political action Staff of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting System and board members of local public broadcasting TV stations have quietly begun organizing around the country what amounts to a loose confederation of political action committees that would drive campaign contributions to congressional candidates committed to increasing, if not maintaining, federal funding of CPB, PBS, and local stations...
...According to Thompson insiders as well as political advisers to Rep...
...As the months pass, Ashcroft is looking Honest John Some conservatives who are sitting out this presidential cycle, and who still hope to make a dent politically at the 2008 Republican Convention, have begun discussing the notion of putting forward former U.S...
...For years both CPB and PBS have been looking for ways to keep Congress—particularly a Republican-controlled Congress—from cutting funding for the left-wing programming...
...better and better as a national leader,” says one former Ashcroft staffer from his days at the Department of Justice...
...says the national political reporter...
...Ashcroft is now running a successful international consulting business out of Washington, and is a popular public speaker...
...Two weeks before he was hovering at 4 or 6 percent [in the polls...
...Thompson ended up finishing third, with more votes than McCain, but in a statistical tie...
...Most recently, even liberal Democrats expressed admiration for his refusal four years ago to bend civil liberty protections related to a request to renew wiretapping authority that then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card and general counsel Alberto Gonzales were pursuing...
...On the Republican side, loyalists to Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, among other senior Bush administration advisers, are on just about every campaign...
...In blog postings on its website, the Politico cited sources inside the Thompson campaign and “Republican” sources...
...He represents the best of the Bush administration and stood up to its worst parts, has ties to the Reagan era, was a popular governor, and keeps the main blocks of the Reagan coalition together...
...CPB is not directly affiliated with PBS, though a great deal of CPB’s grant-giving ends up as programming developed for PBS...
...In recent years, Democrats and left-leaning staffers at CPB and PBS have successfully stymied conservative nominees to the CPB board who have sought to rein in the leftist political agenda of the programming that the organization funds...
...Even though the rumor had been out there for a day or so, no media outlet went with the report...
...There was nothing to support the rumor, just campaign gossip, and if you’ve ever covered one of these things, you know you hear that kind of crap all the time...
...He’d been talking about South Carolina, he’s had a full blown operation there since September when he got into the race...
...At the time we were seeing Thompson’s numbers spiking a bit,” says a pollster who has done work for the Romney camp...
...f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 1 5 “The big question a lot of Newt Gingrich, who has placed former communications direcnewt Politics Just about every major player in Washington has done a good job of putting senior advisers loyal to them in prime spots on the presidential campaigns...
...John Edwards was getting out of the race months before a vote was cast...
...We’re not going to call it a PAC, most likely we’ll call these groups ‘leadership councils’ or something, and we will support federal candidates who promise to support us,” says a board member for a PBS station on the West Coast who is aware of the effort...
...One publication did bite: The Politico newspaper, which earlier in the campaign had floated a rumor that Sen...
...Almost immediately, the Thompson-is-quitting rumor tamped down some of the candidate’s polling momentum, despite the vehement denials from Thompson himself and senior aides...
...It was pretty clear that Thompson wasn’t getting out...
...We’re volunteers and American citizens...
...Both candidates are taking up support from natural pools that Gingrich had been hoping to draw on when he was considering a run for the White House...
...Several days before the Iowa caucuses, reporters on the campaign trail were told by officials from two other campaigns—the McCain and Romney camps— that Thompson had decided to get out of the race the day after the Republican caucus and possibly endorse McCain...
...They can’t stop us from doing what American big business does with its PACs...
...And some in Washington are wondering if there isn’t something more than coincidental about that...
Vol. 41 • February 2008 • No. 1
