Skilluminati Research

The Revelation of the Method

Posted Nov 27, 2010 17 comments

I've been in love with that phrase for years: The Revelation of the Method is not my own invention, but borrowed poetry from the world of conspiracy theory. Although it gets referred to as an actual Masonic concept, it's actually a very recent fabrication from a Catholic "Revisionist Historian" named Michael Hoffman. In his original formulation, the Revelation of the Method is an occult ritual, specifically a "Masonic psychodrama."

Used casually, the implication is always the same: when the Cryptocracy commits major crimes, they will broadcast their intentions in advance, through popular movies and television. Hoffman himself was iffy on the actual order of the process: "it's my contention that these are occult rituals and that like the Rosicrucian Manifestos of the early 17th century they are accompanied by anonymous statements of intent like the original Unabom manifesto, as well as scripts that precede the ritual." Later in the same interview, though, he deviates from his own script: "Look at the movie "The Matrix" in the wake of Columbine. Look at "The Wicker Man" movie in the same time frame as Son of Sam. The themes of the killings are in the movies." Whatever its actual merits, the end result of this theory is pattern recognition in the service of a pre-established conclusion. The Revelation of the Method is how the Illuminati, or the Vatican, or the CIA rub it in our faces.

Of course, Michael A. Hoffman II is also a man who devotes a large portion of his life to questioning the historical veracity of the Nazi Holocaust. He's a religious fundamentalist with weird hobbies, and much like myself, badly in need of an honest editor. I'm not discussing him because he's important or correct on much of anything: he is not. He just happens to be the first source using this particular phrase.

As you might expect, he equates Masonry with Judaism and both with pure pagan Evil, which makes for some eloquent and exquisitely researched nonsense. The evidence boils down to drawing connections between violent crimes and violent media, with no actual chain of causality or conspiratorial links involved. Common themes and overlapping symbols are taken as sufficient proof.

Although this approach is similar to the recent "Synchromysticism" movement, it's important to note that the more grounded minds in that field reject Hoffman outright. When Christopher Knowles from the (outstanding) project The Secret Sun addressed The Revelation of the Method, he was blunt enough to bear repeating:

"First of all, there is no such thing as "Revelation of the Method," it's a speculative concept coined by a extreme-right conspiracy theorist and has no basis in esoteric history or doctrine. Second, I have no interest in talking to people who automatically identify ancient mythological symbols with conspiracy or evil. I'm talking to open-minded people who are looking for a deeper narrative in all of this." -- source link

Christian and Conspiratainment commentators who take on the weighty topic of Hegelian Synthesis usually present it as something invented, an intellectual technology that was unleashed upon the world. Actually, Hegel was diagnosing a pre-existing condition of the human species. The endless iterations of Thesis and Anti-Thesis stretch back throughout the history of human culture. It is a binary trap that has always shaped us: East and West, victors and victims, war and peace. Us and them.

"History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken." It's a great quote, pure poetry, but I can't get with that particular Thesis, when I really think about it. Humans are incredibly adaptable creatures, our brains are robust sense-making machines, and that's how we quickly come to view these nightmares as normal. History is normal days just like this one. "Business as Usual" is exactly what we need to get involved with. You know, just like the Socialists did.

On the Conspiratainment front, as always, we find a new set of answers. In the Infowars archives, the "Revelation of the Method" is a college essay by Hillary Clinton about the work of political realist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky, much like George Soros, has recently achieved Bond Villian Status in the cosmology of popular Mormon/JBS theorist Glenn Beck. Alinsky is the author of "Rules for Radicals," an explicit guide to achieving and exercising power in the tradition of The Prince, The Arthashastra and The Art of War.

Alinsky is worth being afraid of. He is clearly far sharper than any of the conservative propagandists, because in recent years they've simply stolen his material verbatim and re-named it "Rules for Patriots." (Matt Kibbe, you are lazy as fuck.) Besides, no matter what Hillary Clinton thought about Alinsky in College, she got further illuminated during the 1990's orchestrating the push for Health Care reform. Hillary wasn't cynical enough yet, she couldn't process how easily the American electorate could be motivated to become activists against their own interests. Pretty soon, she was talking about "a vast Right wing conspiracy," too. It was documented in a 331 page portfolio of clippings and connections titled "The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce."

It's catching. The most remarkable thing about Conspiracy apophenia, to an amoral free agent like myself, is that it's distinctly contagious. Once infected, we always tend toward greater certainty. This is not lost on Michael Hoffman himself, who proclaims: "Give me two hours with any group of average intelligence and I'll have them reading twilight language and decoding occult rituals for the rest of their lives." I see no reason to doubt him.

Of course, Hoffman himself is a Catholic, a willing subject of the single most successful occult conspiracy in the known history of mankind. The Catholics, it should be noted, are the exact reason why the Freemasons and the Perfectibilists were "secret societies" in the first place: because of vulgarians like Tertullian, Torquemada, or Michael Hoffman. Men who could look at Sacred geometry and basic science, the very language of nature, and see only Satanic evil. Men who would torture and murder for the glory of God's Love. It's pathetic. And it's catching.

Then again...it doesn't exactly help that Saul Alinsky dedicated Rules for Radicals to Satan Himself: "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history... the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer." You can imagine what the NWO fighters make of a quote like that, but to me, it doesn't read like Sympathy for the Devil...it's more like a sly curse. Perhaps Alinsky was winking at young idealists who are charging headfirst down a road paved with good intentions? Che and Lenin both come to mind, for essentially opposite reasons.

It's not like Socialism has a monopoly on horrifying unintended consequences. In fact, human history teaches something far bleaker: every formalized system of government we've created has been perfectly capable of facilitating mass murder, class warfare and repressive regimes. Conspiracy critics like Michael Hoffman allow themselves the luxury of a solution, an answer, a promised land. An honest study of reality allows for no such sentimentality, and recognizes that the only way out of Hell is through it. This is where we stand in the modern world, and no amount of symbolic connections and "Twilight Language" is going to change these naked facts of our condition. Finger-pointing is a cop out. It is not sufficient to merely expose or destroy the Freemasons: it also falls upon us to replace them.

We don't have to look far for real life examples of power elites committing crimes out in the open, and sneering at the general public every step of the way. It's technically known as the Banking industry and they have been stepping up their game dramatically over the past two decades. More audacious and socially destructive than any "occult ritual crime," the spectacular theft of American wealth by a privileged few has been conducted in plain sight, documented through sober PBS documentaries and bestselling books. These are crimes everybody knows about, yet nobody seems to have the power to stop them.

Why can't the Revelation of the Method be about the actual science of social control? Movies and mass murder is such a tiny, schizoid slice of the entire spectrum of control that shapes our waking lives. Fields like political science and sociology have mostly been philosophy and horseshit, but in recent years they've been able to get ahold of serious data -- sufficient "Big Picture" numbers to start recognizing patterns instead of merely creating theories. The kind of headlines that emerge are grimly predictable but undeniably important: "Low incomes make poor more conservative, study finds" or "UT Professor: Economic Inequality is Self-Reinforcing" or more cheerful material like "The Poverty Trap: Why the Poor Pay More."

"Lee had a great knack to visualize. His whole thing was wedges and magnets. What pulls people apart...and what attracts people? You find ways to bring people to you, and ways to divide the people who are against you. This was his bottom line practical theory." -- Richard McBride

I would like to create a Revelation of the Method that functions as real Political Science, something to replace a field which is currently neither Political nor Scientific. As it stands, it's history, with no science involved, and far too little discussion about actual politics -- the technical details of the ongoing Cold War known as Everybody vs. Everybody Else.

There will always be an eye in the pyramid. The human race is a global superorganism managed by a self-selected Elite, thousands of competing and conflicting conspiracies. The goal of Skilluminati Research is to encourage active engagement instead of opposition and resistance...or as Graham Summer observed: "If you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee." I'm not talking about "Democracy" so much as the whole corrupted and invisible System itself. Money, power, religion and war. We need to be engaging with it, because there is no question of working outside of it -- that's a rhetorical flourish, a concept that exists only on paper. Here in the flesh and blood, bombs and bullets, money and food Real World, the System is everywhere at once and consumes all that it touches.

The most dangerous thing about excuses is that they're technically true. There's not much difference between Democrats and Republicans, there's not many avenues to exercise our power safely, and there's way too many problems to deal with simultaneously, it's all true. There's not much hope for the forces of peace. It's also true that all human innovation happens in that tiny space between "not much" and "nothing" -- because we are powerful, and tiny differences will be enough to enact huge changes. Remember, you only ever need 51% of the vote...and best of all, actual voters are already a minority to begin with.

Mark Meckler, the datamining and direct sales guru who created the Tea Party Patriots, has a 40 year plan. Over the weekend of October 2nd, 2010, he got to give a sales pitch the Council for National Policy, asking for a head start on the $100 million dollars it will cost to save America. His "in" was Gary Aldrich, who now sits on the board of TPP. Meckler claims to have 20 million email addresses and he's clearly stated his goals: "Tea Party Patriots plans to convert sixty percent or more of the population to support our core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets."

I know: Braindead horseshit. This frat boy has a 40 year plan, though.

Do we?

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The Conspiratainment Complex

Posted Nov 19, 2010 17 comments

Conspiracy Theory lacks credibility because it has no history. Original research doesn't get cited so much as looted, refitted as filler content to feed new revelations to a hungry audience. They know what they like because they like what they know. It is a product that gets updated for new audiences through a self-selected succession of upstart entrepreneurs. Mae Brussel becomes Lyndon LaRouche becomes Alex Jones.

As a published field, though, Conspiracy Theory has a surprisingly strong foundation. Consider Carroll Quigley's "The Anglo-American Establishment," a masterpiece that completely unravels a powerful, and very real, conspiracy. It's written by an internationally respected Georgetown professor, and it's content has never been disputed. Indeed, it is so meticulously and absurdly detailed that nobody has ever read it. There are lists of names and dates over 10 pages long throughout the text and I find myself skipping whole chapters every time I try and dig in. The information here is seldom referenced today, but it has been co-opted and integrated into the marketplace, too. Professor Quigley becomes Cleon Skousen becomes Glenn Beck.

The signal always gets distorted, degraded...and more popular every time. Dumb is accessible, people like dumb. They like aliens, they like Satanist bad guys, and they like to buy products that signify their secret knowledge. It's hard to exaggerate how hollowed out the Conspiratainment Complex has become in 2010. Conspiracy Theory is literally being taught to Americans on a chalkboard now. Remote Viewing has gone from a classified project to a mini-industry of competing DVD training packages. Even Tila Tequila is tracking the Illuminati's every move these days. This is an emerging demographic and it's going to be extremely important in the next decade.

Consider the rise of Evangelical Christianity as a political force, from the fringes to the frontline. It took decades of negotiations to turn dozens of theological disputes into a single policy platform. Once that machine clicked into place, though, things changed very quickly. This is the social movement that brought us Jimmy Carter and Ralph Reed. It's also the story of a conspiracy, involving hundreds of people, to infiltrate powerful organizations and advance a political agenda. How it happened is the real Political Science.

Jeff Sharlet: Key to the growth of evangelicalism during the last twenty years has been a social structure of “cell groups” that allows churches to grow endlessly while maintaining orthodoxy in their ranks. New Life, for instance, has 1,300 cell groups, or “small groups,” as Pastor Ted prefers to call them. Such a structure is not native to Colorado Springs; in fact, most evangelicals attribute it to Pastor Paul Cho, of South Korea, who has built a congregation of 750,000 using the cell-group structure.

Pastor Ted's insight was in adapting this system for the affluence of the United States. “Free-market globalization” has made us so free, he realized, that an American cell-group system could be mature enough to function just like a market.

In devising New Life's small-group system, Pastor Ted says that he asked himself and his staff a simple question: Do you like your neighbors? And, for that matter, do you even know your neighbors? The answers he got—the Golden Rule to the contrary—were “Not really” and “No.” Okay, said Pastor Ted, so why would you want to be in a small group with them? His point was that arbitrary small groups would make less sense than self-selected groups organized around common interests. Hence New Life members can choose among small groups dedicated to motorcycles, or rock climbing, or homeschooling, or protesting outside abortion clinics.

What, are you too good to learn from Ted Haggard? Anyone who can harness millions of supporters is worth studying and taking seriously. His beliefs are probably not your beliefs, but his goals absolutely are.

In any market, the focus is on "Conversion" -- Baptists want more Baptists, Catholics want more Catholics, and the whole point of 9/11 Truth is to "wake up" the sheeple who haven't seen the light yet. Conversion is a numbers game, and it's been studied scientifically for several centuries, here in the Land of the Free. From Charles Grandison Finney's clinically detailed market testing to the strange duo of Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, there's always been a quiet elite studying how minds get changed. Preaching has been a precise science for longer than modern medicine has even existed. Behind the scenes, from the Great Awakening to the Moral Majority, men have been watching closely and taking notes on everything. Measure, Model, Calculate, Control. Dwight L. Moody taught John Wilbur Chapman taught Billy Sunday.

Real power moves through crooked lines like these. The secret lineage of World Government is more important than the public history. It is more than coincidence that Al Gore and Newt Gingrich were both taught about Toynbee by Alvin Toffler, before they memorized their scripts and walked onstage in the 70s. Alvin Toffler had some zingers of his own, especially the concept of "Ad-hocracy," which describes the flexible and informal power structures that get created by default during times of change and crisis. Conspiracy theory tends towards monolithic explanations, attributing far too much power to far too few people. Political Science assumes the existence of hundreds of co-existing and conflicting conspiracies in any group of over thousand people.

Most real, successful conspiracies are mundane and barely covert: consider the Council for National Policy, an invitation-only Evangelical Conservative influence network with a membership list so powerful it defies belief. What happens when you get Pat Robertson and John Ashcroft into the same room? Throw in Oliver North, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Jesse "33°" Helms, James Dobson, and big money sponsors like Richard DeVos, Holland Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife and Nelson Baker Hunt. Strangely enough, Lawrence McDonald was also a member -- one of the most vocal and powerful members of the John Birch Society was rubbing shoulders with members of the CFR and Trilateral Commission while publicly demanding those same organizations be investigated for treason. He was assassinated in 1983 and like everyone else in this movie, his lineage becomes sadly degraded, as Ron Paul becomes Rand Paul becomes...well, what do you see coming? Look closely.

In 2010, The Watchmen is a superhero movie. In 1918, Les Veilleurs was a superhuman movement. The roots of conspiracy theory and modern Political Science emerge from Synarchy and Fabian Socialism -- but names like Antoine Fabre d'Olivet are not easy on American audiences. Which is unfortunate, because the original Watchmen centered around René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz, one of the most amazing non-fictional characters of his age. There will be more like him, though. Things move too fast for history these days, so the saga of super-scientist Camille Flammarion's secret mission for Rudolf Hess amounts to little more than a neat story now that we're almost a century downstream from aftermath of the first World War. Besides, Les Veilleurs fell to pieces, like most conspiracies do.

Maybe the secret lineage doesn't matter so much after all. Perhaps the dead hand of the past has less influence than we think. The details of how Synarchy was established as a concept, then implemented around the world by dozens of competing conspiracies, probably have no relevance to our situation today. The simple fact It Happened will suffice, as a briefing, because there are more important subjects for us to interact with. Synarchy is not a secret commodity, it's a best-selling business book called The Spider and the Starfish that's been embraced by CEO's and Tea Party organizers in the past year. The New World Order of H.G. Wells has grown into the generic and very exoteric New World Order of market globalization. Fabian Socialism was so successful it became ubiquitous, and even institutionalized as the Council on Foriegn Relations, who openly celebrate their infiltration of US government, business and media.

This is not about which conspiracies are "real," though -- this is about the bigger picture, where dozens of different subcultures have converged into a single market. It was a 20 year process of enterprising graphomaniacs, like Jim Marrs, Graham Hancock and David Icke, synthesizing hundred of books into "Unified Field" conspiracy theories that offered readers a secret history of the entire world.

Today, these competing meta-narratives are blending into a Conspiratainment mainstream, where the largest possible audience meets the lowest common denominator. Roswell is an article of faith, JFK is holy scripture, and 9/11 is the wedge issue and the litmus test. The Apollo 11 mission exists in a Schroedinger-style quantum state where it simultaneously did and did not land on the moon, although the priesthood agrees there was a cover-up, either way.

The concept of the Overton Window is essential, especially now that it's being whitewashed into a generic civics lesson. Joeseph Overton created an important blueprint for successful conspiracies, the Window of Political Possibility. The civics lesson whitewash positions Overton's concept as a theory about public participation in government. The reality is that the Window represents a sandbox which is owned and operated by a small, powerful conspiracy. The job of PR and government operatives is move the Overton Window by establishing the limits of "Acceptable Public Discourse." The conversation should be about how we go to war with Iran, not if we go to war with Iran.

This is an explicit statement about media control. Overton never saw this as a natural process, but as a managed project. It wasn't a social theory so much as it was ad copy for his Mackinac think tank. It's a visualization of what Think Tanks do: taking privately-funded business goals, positioning them as important public policy reforms, and then working with the media to push the message until it becomes normalized enough to pass into law without controversy.

The window is a scale that claims to run from "More Freedom" to "Less Freedom," but this is not a system of measurement. You simply position the policy you don't like as "Less Free," and then you designate your current sponsor's goals on the other end of the spectrum...and through the magic of Framing, Americans aren't less safe, they're "More Free."

That much is true. We're more free every year.

So what will the Conspiratainment Complex grow into? Who is doing the polling work to determine where this emerging demographic stands on The Issues? What is the common ground between Alex Jones and Glenn Beck and Rand Paul? Will Stanton Friedman ever pay for his sins?

More importantly, could all this have played out any other way? People are wise to mistrust "Marketing," but naive to think they'll be able to know it when they see it. Marketing has consumed everything in our culture, and there is no way to build a mainstream political movement without some serious merchandising involved.

"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." That's Andrew Card, talking about the Iraq War. It's too late to mistrust marketing: We won. It's too late to lament about how far we've fallen. Everything is marketing and we have to engage reality. Stickers and shirts, baby. Business cards and style guides and databases, too. The metrics of conversion.

I don't like Ed Dames and Richard Hoagland, but I don't hate them, either. I understand why Richard Dolan made the decisions he's made to get a larger audience for his work. Every single guest on Coast to Coast AM is a true American entrepreneur, trying to find a business model that clicks with the masses. Conspiracy Theory has no history because it's never been about history -- it's about product testing.

These guys are all just doing their jobs. Ultimately, that's the worst I can say about any of them. They're building their email lists and trying to get as much media coverage as possible. They're all doing the same radio shows and conferences. They're all showing up on each other's blogs and podcasts. Thus do you make money in the Conspiratainment Complex. It might be less profitable than mortgage modification, but it's more interesting.

I'm not pointing fingers, I'll sell out eventually, too. Skilluminati becomes MSNBC becomes TMZ. And I'll be selling your email address to the highest bidder, every step of the way. Tell Warren Tompkins I'm coming for him.

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2010 | Year of the Ghost

Posted Nov 13, 2010 4 comments

"He understood that the media beast can only be chewing on one ankle at a time." -- Howard Fineman, Newsweek

I see Lee Atwater all over the country these days, and that's pretty weird, because Lee Atwater is dead. He has been for years, and yet it's 2010 and his fingerprints are all over the scene of the crime.

We're all living in Lee's world now, which is somewhere between a Sick Joke and a Damn Shame, because in his final year of life, Lee himself concluded he didn't want to live here after all. He spoke from a wheelchair before his friends and family: "I had money, I had power, I had fame and I had fortune. Guess what, it meant nothing, it was all a waste. I learned what counts, and that's you all...human relationships."

In the Year of the Ghost, though, human relationships are defined by databases. Acxiom, Experian, the Dun & Bradstreet and the InfoUSA. "Secure the list," as Karl Rove used to put it. Segmentation is an artform, and you have to truly hate human beings to do it honestly and accurately.

We get the leaders we deserve -- but that's not Karma, that's because candidates are tailor made to fit us. The 2010 Elections were a startling victory for political consultants, because it was a "Proof of Concept" illustration that they no longer need to rely on the DNC/RNC system for candidates. Rather than "positioning" damaged goods from a dying breed -- career politicians and public servants -- they can now focus on building candidates from the ground up. Mere campaigns are gone now. The Tea Party was a sandbox for product testing. There will be more.

Despite the hype about social media as a political force in 2008, the online platform that Barack Obama© hired Blue State Digital to create barely got touched this year. That's because 2010 was shaped early by two techniques that should be hopelessly outdated: direct mail microtargeting and meatspace ground game. This is where Karl Rove & Co. built their foundation in Texas, this is the jungle where Ralph Reed killed so many hapless Democrat incumbents. Power on this level is invisible and subliminal, a hidden priesthood lineage from Billy James Hargis to Richard Viguerie to Terry Dolan to Alex Gage.

The message is not all that gets focus-tested...goals need research, too. The real artistry is where political campaigns and social engineering overlap: finding the sweet spot where the vested interests of the wealthiest 1% can be positioned into wedge issues that motivate the bottom 99%. In this respect, 2010 was a triumph for invisible power. This year marked the conclusion of a 50 Year Plan and the emergence of a new American majority which has been built entirely by dead men.

From the top of the pyramid, there is no pyramid. It's a simple fact, but often lost on those of us watching from below, taking notes on the power structure and sifting through clues every day. The view from the cockpit is very different from what the rest of the plane sees. As Bill Moyers said of David Rockefeller: "What some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life, and just another days work."

What most Americans call consensus reality is a fabricated narrative that's been carefully tested and calibrated for over a century now. Throughout decades of focus groups and scientific polling and cognitive infiltration and psychological operations, the number one client has always been America itself, or at least America the brand, America the image. Making the world safe for Democracy. Everything is phrasing in the Year of the Ghost.

"Write the plan, position the client, write the copy, secure the list, design the package, supervise and generate some production here, and set up a system to analyze the response, to understand what worked and what didn't." -- Karl Rove

A free enterprise system, a strong national defense, and support for traditional Western values. Horrible things always sound so harmless when you hire professional copywriters. Is a New Populist Revolt on the Way? Well, Viguerie actually wrote that entire script back in 1984, and you can still get it on Amazon.

The overlap between marketing and politics is inevitable when both of them cater to the lowest common denominator and the biggest possible audience. History is full of marketing men who had successful careers working in politics: Walter Lippmann, Ivy Lee, Tim LaHaye, and the notorious self-promoting usurper Edward Bernays. Nothing changes, either. In 2008, Brian Collins and company won the Ad Age prize for Marketer of the Year. Their project? Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Post-Reality Politics

Todd Cefaratti easily wins the Skilluminati Adeptus prize for his creative entrepreneurial spirit. Todd is an Arizona-based infomarketer who founded JoinTheTeaParty.us and sunk $180,000+ on advertisement, link farming and SEO. The result was a top-ranked site that many thousands of rubes took to be the official Tea Party headquarters. Todd has built a massive mailing list and taken in $469,000 in donations...absolutely none of which was spent on Tea Party candidates or causes.

A toast to Mr. Cefaratti for furnishing the American herd with such an elegant lesson in free market economics. Here's Todd, driving away from CBS camera crews in his 2010 Escalade with the custom "TPARTY1" plates...

Cerfaratti was just buying into a new niche, though. Perhaps he was sick of the Reverse Mortgage info-marketing grind? He made an upfront investment to build a serious list and now he's got a much more interesting home business. Information Marketing is probably a better training ground for a political operative than politics itself, these days. The A/B Testing loop, the segmented lists, the auto-responder cycles, the CRM funnels, analytics and response rates: it's all the same language now. Marketing and politics both rely on the techniques of Branding, and the outcome is very much the same, too. From our low voter turnout to the high return rates for "information products," this is not a system geared for customer satisfaction.

That's what 2010 was really about: the most expensive election in US history was a mid-term. Thanks to recent innovations like the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC decision allowing unlimited corporate political spending, or the US Chamber of Commerce's new program of funneling money from foreign corporations into our elections, the bidding war for access to the social control machinery of the United States is finally allowed to operate openly. American consumers can look forward to a full-time, never-ending campaign season that consumes the entire media cycle from 2010 until the power fizzles out from coast to coast.

In the future, voter turnout will go up...and that's not a good thing.

"Make them angry and stir up the hostilities. The shriller you are, the easier it is to raise funds. That's the nature of the Beast." -- Terry Dolan

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Veteran’s Day 2010

Posted Nov 11, 2010

"take your pleasantries
your generalizations, good intentions,
sweet words, and half-truths,
put them in a box.
drape a flag over it.
and bury it with the rest of the dead."

- Orrin Gorman McClellan
March 22, 1985 - May 18, 2010
Requiescat in pace, Amor et gratia

Filed in: Social Control

Ken Mehlman: “Hope is Not a Strategy”

Posted Nov 10, 2010 9 comments

Policy is shaped by the same demographic polling feedback cycles that shape campaigns. The sales pitch never stops in America. Barack Obama is a student of history and the past 30 years make it clear there's no other game in town. Like any thinking human, Obama is not happy with the world as he finds it.

His words: "Karl Rove can afford to win with 51 percent of the vote. They're not trying to reform healthcare. They are content with an electorate that is cynical about government. Progressives have a harder job. They need a big enough majority to initiate bold proposals." Of course, Obama's got ghostwriters and silent sponsors, too. Perception Managment and Opposition Research is the name of the game, and as presidential candidates transition towards being corporate spokesmodels, things will only get weirder from here.

It's been pretty bad for a very long time. How does a Bush regime even happen? I'm a big fan of mechanics and I have no patience for philosophy and theory. My thirst for answers with substance has primarily led me to sources like Karl Rove and his protege, Ken Mehlman. Bush critics have nothing to offer but their complaints, Bush insiders provide a more practical perspective. Running a political campaign is little different from any other high-level business venture.

The following is an edited transcript of an interview he delivered for PBS Frontline, focusing on the parts where he details the work of campaign management. His testimony is about a discipline that dominates modern politics: the art of running a two-term campaign. Clinton learned it from studying Reagan, but Bush II turned it into a simple science. Mehlman lays out the secret sauce in five words: "good policy is good politics."

Meet Ken Mehlman

Hope is not a strategy, and a lot of people who are in politics and business and elsewhere say, "We're doing this; we hope it works." Well, the question is, how do you know if it's working? I strongly believe in having benchmarks that you agree on up front that will tell you if it's working, and measuring those benchmarks on a regular basis. Our goal is to raise X; how much does that mean we need to raise per week to get there? How do we measure that per week, how do we measure it per city [and] how do we measure it per event so that we're not surprised when they find out we're not doing well or we are doing well?

So the 2004 campaign did that for everything. We did it for raised dollars; we did it for voter registration; we did it for number of visits we wanted to make to different places around the country; we did it for polling; we did it for number of people who wanted to book on television. I was the campaign manager; my job was to be the CEO of the campaign. Well, you're not going to be effective if you're micromanaging people. So how do you simultaneously take that job and also be sure that you know things are going along? My belief is, develop a plan. When you agree with the different people who are helping do this, one, how do you measure if a plan is successful? That's known as metrics.

We had made an unprecedented effort on behalf of grassroots in 2000, and we wanted to continue with that effort and to try to institutionalize that effort and improve that effort even more. Secondly, we looked at the electorate, and we said, "What does it take to get to 51 percent, and where do we need to improve?" And we made a methodical effort to try to improve among Latinos, among African Americans, among women, among the Jewish Americans, and state by state, to improve among those key groups. And there were other groups we needed to maintain our support among.

There was a very methodical effort over the last four years to say: "How do we grow the electorate in a way that is beneficial to the president? And how do we bring new folks into the cause, and how do we make sure that our political tactics are the most effective they can be?" We used the '01 and '02 elections to test those tactics for '04.

The press, unfortunately for them, believes that it's zero-sum, that it's either a base or a swing strategy. And the fact is, we appeal to both. As I said, from a base perspective, conservatives increased their participation level as a proportion of the electorate. Republicans were for the first time ever equal to Democrats in their participation level of the electorate. At the same time, 44 percent of the Latino vote, the highest ever. We improved our performance among people that live in big cities by 13 points, from 26 to 39 percent. African Americans go up, Jewish Americans go up, women go up. Across the political spectrum, we not only appealed to the red areas, making them redder, but we turned a lot of blue areas purple.

We raise a lot of money in the mail. But typically, the way a presidential campaign works is -- and certainly Republican campaigns -- in the beginning you'll raise more money in events and less money in the mail, and at the end, more money in the mail and less money in events, because your direct mail donors typically give when they hear a lot of news on politics.

My job as political director was to oversee that process for the White House and for the administration: Who do we travel to? Who do we help? Who do we raise money for? And what do we talk about when we go there? What advice do we give them? How can we help them in an appropriate way? All those were part of my mission. A lot of it's based on polling; a lot of it's based on the number of days that are available; a lot of it's based on the number of electoral votes in the state. We have a formula we allocate and move around and change. Sara Taylor was the person who was responsible for developing that formula and helping make sure that we kept on track on that formula.

The advantage of having a system that measures is, you don't worry. I never was laying awake at night worrying about the campaign. During the entire 18 months, I slept like a baby every single night because I had confidence in our plan and in our people and in our system. And that confidence was buoyed by the fact that I was getting information that confirmed things were going the right way. The same thing with voter registration; same thing with the number of presidential visits; same thing with everything we do. If you can't measure it, it's not worth doing, because then you know whether you're being successful. That's how you avoid hope being your strategy.

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