Campaign Shenanigans
Gray, C. Boyden
Campaign Shenanigans by C. Boyden Gray One unanticipated benefit of Bob Dole s decision to give up his Senate seat and majority leadership is that he may throw the White House rapid-response...
...And there were limits: We had to have separate speechwriters, for example, and the opposition-research operation was located exclusively at the campaign...
...Period...
...The Clintonites have made brilliant use of White House officials to answer, attack, and preempt Bob Dole, an effort led by presidential assistants Gene Sperling and Bruce Reed...
...But this was cumbersome and time-consuming...
...But given the sophistication of modern communications, a president does not have to fly Air Force One to St...
...This proved a substantial problem for us in the Bush White House: Every time campaign chairman (and former commerce secretary) Robert Mosbacher came into a White House meeting, budget director Richard Darman had to leave-which, fortunately or unfortunately, meant that Mosbacher soon stopped coming to the White House...
...The trap for a sitting president running for reelection is that it is illegal to use appropriated funds for purely political purposes...
...But their free ride may come to an end on June 11, when Dole steps down...
...By minimizing contacts between the campaign and the White House, the funnel ensured the legalities were observed...
...C. Boyden Gray is a partner at the Washington law firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering...
...There is some reason to think the Clintonites may not be as pristine...
...The funnel channeled all contacts between the White House and the campaign through the chief of staff's office, which then reviewed all requests for campaign appearances and speeches for consistency with the president's program...
...If, on the other hand, some of the key people have moved over to be paid by the campaign, are they in fact working in the campaign offices, or are they really still camped out in the White House...
...Both of them gave up their outside consulting and recused themselves from matters in which they had previous significant involvement...
...And if it is paid for by the campaign, it cannot be developed inside the White House...
...Dole's retirement, the taxpayer subsidy should stop...
...But if the outside political types do keep operating out of the White House, they could have an equally serious problem...
...To be sure, it is not hard to cook up an "official" event around which the White House can drape a campaign appearance, so long as the president doesn't make statements about his own reelection...
...It led to squabbles and bitterness...
...Maybe Dick Morris advises only other candidates and suspected rapists, but it is very likely the White House will be hearing from Democratic political consultants comparable to Republicans like Charlie Black and Bob Teeter...
...Do the campaign advisers have any outside corporate clients...
...1301, which limits the use of appropriated funds to those purposes provided by law...
...But when the trigger is purely political, not legislative, as will be the case upon Sen...
...Campaign Shenanigans by C. Boyden Gray One unanticipated benefit of Bob Dole s decision to give up his Senate seat and majority leadership is that he may throw the White House rapid-response effort into legal jeopardy...
...Even if they are at the campaign, coordinating events with White House staff, the Clintonites could be running into serious problems...
...Will the political consultants who work with the Clinton reelection effort do the same...
...Managing the tightrope is very difficult...
...I know more about this than I would like to because I served as George Bush's counsel during the last presidential reelection effort...
...So the public and the media should be asking the following questions: • Has the White House moved any of the rapid-response operation outside to the campaign...
...In his recent book, Bush press secretary Marlin Fitzwater placed a considerable amount of blame for our botched 1992 campaign on "my" funnel...
...They could, for example, become "special government employees," the status enjoyed by Travelgate instigator Harry Thomason in 1993, and thus subject to both financial disclosure and the conflict provisions of Section 208 of the Criminal Code (a provision that does not apply to Congress, by the way...
...In either case, though, if the newsworthy commentary is political in nature, it has to be paid for by the campaign...
...They could be violating revolving-door rules, which prohibit former high-level executive-branch staffers from asking anything of their former colleagues for a year's time...
...This article is intended to ensure that the media pay comparable attention to the Clinton campaign's observance of the necessary niceties...
...He can simply talk into a satellite feed to local or regional media and make news, so long as he has something newsworthy to say...
...The Reagan and Bush campaigns tried to manage this tightrope with what we called a "funnel...
...And even with those awkward attempts at squaring the circle, we still took many shots from the press for various alleged moral and ethical lapses...
...Because of our reading of campaign finance and ethics laws in 1991-laws that had tightened considerably since Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign-we found it necessary to twist the White House staff into pretzels to avoid breaking the law...
...If not, there could be violations of 31 U.S.C...
...Louis or Los Angeles to make news...
...No sooner does the Dole campaign merely announce a speech than the counterspin begins and Dole's policy is hijacked...
...So long as White House responses or policy preemptions relate to Dole the Senate majority leader, they can be paid for by the taxpayers as part of the ordinary business of trying to cope with a divided government...
Vol. 1 • June 1996 • No. 39
