American Maggie

Among Washington’s many dedicated public servants, there are always a few members of the Beltway establishment who are willing to stretch the truth to make a quick buck and plant a juicy headline. The darlings of the elite media are often those who provide fodder – sometimes questionable – for a good story. The latest in this class of Washington’s self-promoters is Matt Latimer, former Special Assistant to the President for Speechwriting, who’s newly published book “Speech-less” includes countless tall tales and, frankly, overt personal aggrandizements of Latimer’s role in the Bush White House. 

Let me preface this by saying that I was privileged to serve in the West Wing of the White House from June 2006 -January 2009, first on the Domestic Policy Council, and then in the Office of the Chief of Staff. However, unlike Latimer, I do not claim to have been privy to the high level decisional meetings where the President was briefed by his top aides on the issues of the day; nor should I have been included, as an untested staffer in my early twenties. But, I was intimately involved in the coordination and planning of those Presidential briefings – from working with Staff Secretary’s office to finalize the briefing memos to working with my direct supervisor to approve the final list of meeting participants. 

Therefore, having spent many 18 hr+ days in the West Wing with the President’s top advisors – particularly during the breakneck pace of policymaking during the economic crisis -I found it surprising to read the clips of Latimer’s involvement and so-called insider’s insight on President Bush’s nuanced economic policy acumen and general political awareness. I can’t even remember a single instance where Latimer walked into the Chief of Staff’s suite, a place where the top level speechwriters would often come to finalize details of the White House’s communications strategy and Presidential remarks. As Dana Perino said on NRO’s The Corner, “I’m pretty sure that almost everyone who worked in the White House could not pick Matt out of a lineup.”

The short excerpt in GQ alone is chock full of blatant factual errors – which is ironic since the White House Speechwriting Office had its own factchecking department.  There are quite a few “rumor had it…,” “I was told that…,” and other third or fourth hand tidbits making the reader question: Is this book based completely on heresay?  For example, Latimer writes: “Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign informed Josh Bolten that McCain was going to phone the President and urge him to call off the address and instead hold an emergency economic summit in Washington.” Get your facts straight, I can give you the tick tock having answered the phone call from the McCain campaign; the book doesn’t even correctly identify the person to whom the McCain campaign reached out.

Or my other favorite: “The economic team the President put together at first included his friend Al Hubbard. He may have been a competent advisor; I really didn’t know him. The only think I knew about Al was that he went around putting whoopee cushions on people’s chairs in the West Wing.” A valid question for Latimer is, if you were so involved in crafting the President’s economic speeches, how could you not know the President’s chief in-house economic policy advisor? Oh, and the whoopee cushion incident, you should have been there. But of course, I’m sure that nugget was second-hand, because the details aren’t right. Shame on Latimer’s editors.

Most importantly, I found one particular excerpt from Latimer’s recent GQ article particularly telling: “On Capitol Hill, I worked for a congressman who ‘misremembered’ basic facts, such as the ‘Eisenhower assassination.’ I worked for a Senator who hid from his own staff…At the Pentagon, as chief speechwriter to Donald Rumsfeld, I battled an entrenched civil-service system and an inept communications team.” This excerpt says more about Latimer than the caliber of Washington’s elected officials. After all, it is easy to be the quiet staffer and advisor in the room who doesn’t have the courage to speak up and share their opinions; who just passively and silently works for a superior for whom you have questionable respect. Rather than writing a critical after-the-fact book a la Scott McClellan, you should have raised your opinions and offered advice at the time or simply quit. 

Working for an elected official, or any superior for that matter, it is one’s job as an advisor and staffer to raise any objections and opinions – that, in essence, is the value of one’s advice. In college, I served as a researcher for Ted Sorenson, one of President Kennedy’s top advisors, and one particular comment from Sorenson that has always stuck with me is that the best advisors are those that do not say what the President wants to hear, but say what the President needs to hear. Latimer is clearly not of this caliber. It is easy to mudsling after being the silent guy in the room during the tough decisions; it is even easier to mudsling when you’re not even IN the room for the tough decisions.

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Elise Stefanik is the President and Founder of American Maggie. She previously served in the Bush Administration’s Office of the Chief of Staff.

New York’s 20^th Congressional District occupies a fair portion of enchantingly beautiful and richly historic real estate in northern New York.  Referred to by some as the “Cradle of Democracy,” not far from where I sit on this cool Adirondack evening, a group of colonial Americans, mostly farmers with hearts enflamed for the cause of American freedom, faced the British Forces at Saratoga and emerged victorious in a battle that became known as the turning point of the American Revolution.  That was in the autumn of 1777.  And, pointing the dial in any direction from this compass, you will locate countless signs and symbols dotting the countryside, marking the sacrifices and achievements of those brave men and women who, over the decades, were born and bred on American freedom and kept it secure for posterity.

How ironic that on this very same territory in less than one year, the citizens of NY-20 have lost the Congressional seat not once, but twice to liberal Democrats.   First, in November 2008 to now Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who’s clever cooing into her constituents’ ears drew many into the false belief that she is a “conservative” Democrat, (if Senator Gillibrand is a conservative of any stripe, then I am the reincarnation of Cleopatra!), and again in the March 2009 special election to fill the seat vacated by then Congresswoman Gillibrand.  Scott Murphy, a most liberal Democrat, won the seat and rapidly established himself as the “Pelosi-Reid-Obama” rubber stamp that many recognized him to be during the campaign.  

In his vision for a “better tomorrow”, Congressman Scott Murphy lost no time and voted for HR 1409, the “Employee Free Choice Act”.   Sounds nice but the fact is that this Act does not allow free choice for workers, it gives  Big Labor the freedom to choose IF they want to allow a secret ballot election to occur, or not!   What a hoot!   The Obama U.S. Department of Labor Secretary appointee, Hilda Solis, (a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America) has got to love this one!   But there’s more, like the gift that keeps on giving, Congressman Murphy also supports Cap and Trade.   He voted for the cap and trade legislation that, if passed, will blast up the price of your electrical bill, your fuel bill, and anything else in this country that we may want to do, or to use, or to buy that uses energy.  Think of it!  Thanks a lot, Scott!

How did we get here?  I can only offer you my personal perspective.  Having volunteered extensively on both referenced campaigns for the Republican candidates, I found many interested and positive people.  But as well, I found a daunting number of those who were complacent, or who actually felt that campaign activities posed an effrontery to their tranquility and those who want something for nothing in which case, the Democrat candidate made more sense to them.

As a volunteer, I have also turned my gaze to my own Warren County Republican Committee.  I am aware that they raise funds for the candidates.  However, I can honestly say that I saw none of the 129 committee members out on any of those door-to-door walks that I, and a dedicated group of about ten others, made day after day in that cold March weather.  I actually inquired on election evening by asking the manager of our local campaign office and he affirmed what I had thought to be true, that out of the core of about ten volunteers who appeared regularly, none of them were from the Warren County Republican Committee.

I am convinced that if even the majority of those 129 committee people had joined us on each of those March weekends, that we would have had a far better chance of winning that last election which was a painfully close shave – our candidate conceded at the difference of 300 votes.  Multiply that by the other nine counties in NY-20!

Again, I can only speak about the county in which I live, but if the county party separates itself from the grassroots population for any reason whatsoever, we will continue to spiral downward. It does not bode well for our political hopes if our own county committee is dysfunctional, like a steel trap with no one coming out to help and no one being allowed to enter it.   What good is a committee whose members treat it as a private club enjoying the prestige of membership, but not working at the basic level to get our candidates elected?  They should be thrown out and the positions given to others who will do a better job for the candidates and for the constituents.

If you research your own regional “tea party” groups, you will no doubt see how organized the Democrats are at the grassroots level!  They send volunteers, ACORN and labor union representatives to counter the pro-freedom tea party protesters.  When the opposition saw our small tea party in Saratoga protesting Obama health care recently, we found their website enthusiastically urging their followers to activate themselves and to each go out and get 25 signatures for their petitions! 

What I have been hopefully illustrating is what I see as the ‘perfect storm’ swirling above the political inertia typified by the Republican party of today which has and is currently propelling Democrats into a leadership which has subsequently slashed our freedoms one by one.

President Obama has named Congressman John McHugh of NY-23 to be the civilian head of the US Army.  There will be a special election to fill that seat and let us hope that our counterparts in Central New York don’t make the same mistakes that we have.   This Democrat cherry picking has gone on far enough – we don’t need it to become a cherry harvest, or our collective “Cradle for Democracy” will be rolling in it’s grave.

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Nadine Battaglia is the mother of a special needs child and is engaged in local politics in Upstate New York.

Why is it every time the government comes up with a “fix” or “solution” it just makes everything worse? The cash for clunkers program, while well intentioned, has driven us down a dead end road. In a remarkably short time that has become a showcase for why government gets it wrong much of the time and why we should put the brakes on moving forward on additional programs which seek to infuse government’s “logic” into our healthcare market, delivered to you directly by the designers of the cash for clunkers program.

The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act (CARS program), commonly known as Cash for Clunkers, gained notoriety for having “run out of money.” But, not only did the Cash for Clunkers program fall short in terms of its funding, it fell short in the way the program was set up from the outset. This wasn’t just an effort to get “dirty” cars off the freeway, it was a brazen movement by government to change people’s behavior. This is activist government at its worst — at a time when what we really need is a realist government that works better for us.

Let’s start with some basics of the program. When a “clunker” was turned in, the government demanded the old car be made inoperable. Did no one in the Obama administration think cars that are turned in could be fixed up and used by those who cannot afford a new vehicle? I know some great mechanics throughout our state who would have loved the chance to offer that help. We could be using these vehicles to enable someone to be self-sufficient through the freedom to travel on their own terms; to a job interview, to a job or to daycare. This mobility may have enabled them to take or keep that job which will lift them out of poverty and break a cycle of government dependence. With the sweep of the President’s pen signing a law which required the destruction of the low valued cars just because they may have had lower mileage standards than what the elite in this country want to accept — these dreams were destroyed.

Why did we spend billions of dollars in a way that encourages waste, discourages creativity, and forces people into more reliance on government? Oh, wait, that describes the modus operandi of nearly all government programs which seek a quick fix or short-term political gain without full understanding of the real implications and trade-offs. While the initial goal of the cash for clunkers program — to stimulate the sales of cars — may have been a good goal, the program will fail to create or jumpstart long term economic growth. The economic stimulus is short term at best (so what happens when sales flatten out?), the program design is irresponsible (we’ve taken good, affordable cars away from people who need them) and typical of government intervention, the details of the program are difficult to wade through. One auto dealer recently said that it is “almost as if President Obama has to approve each sale himself.”  If this short sighted Cash for Clunker model of government intervention is our new path toward prosperity, we should turn back now, because it is leading us to a dead end. We must make a sharp turn to get back on the road to prosperity.

The path that will lead us toward prosperity and economic recovery needs a model of government that does not try to guide our every move. We need government to be more flexible, more targeted, more limited in mission and more focused on allowing all of us to solve problems, not just bureaucrats. We need and should expect a government to be more effective and successful in the use of the hard-earned dollars from its taxpayers. No longer can we or should we put up with a government which is a caricature easily ridiculed on late night TV.

While the Cash for Clunkers is just one example, there are too many more examples of ineffective government that is neither smart nor targeted. The path we are on is a dead end. There is a better way. Just think if families were allowed to keep that $4,500 in their paycheck in the first place? Maybe they would spend that money on a new car. Maybe they would use that money to purchase health insurance or fix the roof on their house. Think of the long lasting benefit if they were allowed to keep those dollars and use it to send their child to college. Just think if they could put those dollars to work by starting a new business or hiring a new employee. It really is a matter of priorities.

Now, close your eyes and imagine, just imagine that the designers of the Cash for Clunkers program — which ran out of money, became a bureaucratic nightmare difficult for all involved, and encouraged wasteful and misdirected decisions to destroy perfectly fine vehicles – are in charge of your family’s healthcare.  Don’t you think your family’s health is too important to get it wrong just so politicians can get a “political win” in the short term.

It is about time we stand up and expect our leaders to quit creating new programs on top of old ones — none of which solve long term problems and all of which place more and more burden on the next generation. Real answers to our real problems that face us long term will come from we, the people, not they, the government.

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Laura Brod is a State Representative in Minnesota where she serves as ranking Minority member of the Tax Committee, and is a member of the Health Care Policy and Finance Committees, and the General Finance Committee.