There was still, however, the question of which videos to release. I wanted to launch the Baltimore and Washington tapes in close proximity to each other, so that ACORN and its allies would think these kids had done only a regional hit. It would never occur to them that this story had coast-to-coast implications, that these kids had done something far wider in scope. If I had released the videos from Baltimore and Los Angeles, I figured they would have known the extent of their problem. I also wanted to give them a chance to float the inevitable “a few bad apples” defense. So by making the story regional, I was sandbagging them.
But as we neared launch date, I was worried. We had the what and the when, but the big issue of where we should launch still loomed. As much as I wanted to exclusively use the web-based New Media, I wasn’t sure I could rely on the ACORN scandal trickling up from just Big Government, YouTube, and the viral Internet. I knew this ground-up strategy might not work, because the Complex had crafted a response to viral stories: Media Matters.
In an effort to act as a firewall to protect the left from ACORN-like stories, and in response to the success of groups like the Swift Boat Vets, the mainstream media had created a rear-protecting unit, Media Matters. Its workers—“senior fellows” as they like to be called—are generally white, web-savvy young guys. Media Matters raises a lot of money, seven to ten million dollars per year, to nitpick a story to death, delegitimizing it, isolating it, and then claiming it has been debunked. The content at Media Matters is then repeated all over the left-wing media, from the networks to MSNBC and CNN to the New York Times, as received wisdom.
I knew Media Matters and its ilk could kill off a story before it got started by nitpicking it in its infancy. And let’s be honest here, I wasn’t dealing from strength; though I had the truth. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles weren’t professional filmmakers. I didn’t have a thirty-person staff of reporters or a personal staff or a PR team. So a viral, web-based rollout, however attractive, couldn’t be risked. I had to hit overwhelmingly, from all angles. I needed the tsunami. And I needed it to build to the point that it swamped the Media Matters breaching wall and washed right into the newsrooms. Then the mainstream media would have to deal with the fact that they were wet, and the water was rising.
I should mention that as clever or obvious as all this might sound, in retrospect there was no shortage of those who disagreed with me. I had in fact showed the videos to a couple of prominent old-school journalists, and they both told me that the Plan was a loser, that I needed to drop the videos neutron-bomb style—in one place, and all at once. They were also worried about the techniques James and Hannah had used. But talking to them actually strengthened my conviction—their objections sounded musty, outdated; and I realized that on this one I was going to ignore the advice of my elders and betters. I would stick to the “drip-drip-drip from everywhere” strategy I was so convinced would work.
It was time to get started.
I began by giving the Old Guard a fair shot—after all, they were still the prevailing power, and I couldn’t really gripe if they didn’t cover a story they hadn’t known about. So I approached a contact at ABC News and showed him the videos. He was blown away. But then he told me ABC News would never run it because it was “too political.”
I felt vindicated already.
Next, I approached one of my contacts at Fox News. I told him about the ACORN story, and simply handed him a copy of the tapes. I didn’t tell him what to do with it. I simply said, “This is what we’re going to do on Big Government, and we’re going to give you the full audio and video. You can do whatever you want with it. And you can ask James O’Keefe whatever you wish.”
Now, I didn’t just do this because I wanted the story to break on Fox News (even though I did). I did it because I believed that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t launch a story of this magnitude without having the massive legal authority of Fox check to see whether everything was legit. Handing it to Fox News gave me my highest level of confidence. I had a small business running out of a basement—they had a billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate. They were better equipped than I was to ensure that everything was on the straight and narrow. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I still had to worry that maybe I was being punked, and that this was all a giant scheme, that maybe James hadn’t told me the whole truth and that I was the target of an even grander plot. Giving the video to Fox News was like enlisting your tough older brother against a pack of schoolyard bullies.
Still, I went to sleep that night with an inkling that something might go wrong. My biggest fear was that Fox would have second thoughts and refuse to launch it, and we’d lose our tsunami. My second-biggest fear—which rose in paranoid moments late in the night—was that Fox would refuse to run it because they had discovered it was a scam and that I was the rube who’d been taken.
At five o’clock in the morning, I got a phone call from my contact at Fox News. “There’s a problem,” he said. “It was supposed to launch at six with Megyn Kelly. It broke this morning on Fox & Friends.”
I couldn’t even pretend to be upset. Larry and I had been so stressed about launching this story, about having dotted all our i’s and crossed all our t’s, fearful all the time that something would go seriously wrong—and now I was being told Fox had run with it first thing that morning. It was the equivalent of your wife going into labor two days before the due date, and the doctor apologizing for handing you a perfect baby forty-eight hours early. Our response wasn’t angst—it was exultation.
The Fox News call prompted a massive scramble on our part to get all the material up at Big Government right away. Somehow, we did. Fox News was going with it, the print media was teed up, and Big Government was ready. All we could do now was wait.
ACORN itself gave us our first little victory. Scott Levenson, ACORN’s spokesman, responded to the regular airing of the Day One video on Fox by claiming that “the portrayal is false…. This film crew tried to pull this sham at other offices and failed.” Perfect. So far, everyone was playing their roles (and really, what other defense could Levenson have used?). It worked for us because we knew that Day Two’s release, the DC video, would prove that Levenson and the ACORN leadership were either lying or painfully misinformed.
There must have been some panicked strategy sessions and conference calls in the wake of the first video drop, but by the evening of Day One, ACORN made its first attempt at damage control: they fired two of the lackeys in the Baltimore office. “They were two part-time employees,” said Baltimore ACORN Co-chairwoman Sonja Merchant-Jones. “One was a receptionist and the other was a part-time tax preparer.” To her credit, Merchant-Jones perceived our strategy: “It’s no coincidence that this video was released after the president’s speech.”2
She may have understood our timing, but she—and ACORN itself—clearly thought that would end the story.
Not quite.
On Friday morning, we released the Washington, DC, video. It was just as damning as the Baltimore video. By now, the ACORN tapes were pinging around the Internet, and Fox had the story in steady rotation. We knew that we were drawing blood when ACORN abandoned white spokesperson Scott Levenson in favor of the dashiki-clad African-American Bertha Lewis. Clearly, political correctness, the race card, and Alinsky were going to be their playbook—a tried-and-true defense.
That day, Friday, I flew to Quincy, Illinois, for the 9/12 Tea Party. Right before we got on the airplane, I was informed that ACORN had fired two more employees in DC.
That wasn’t a small thing. It meant that we had gotten our BAM! BAM! It was a double blow, an affirmation from ACORN that what they were seeing on the video was not only absolutely wrong—it was trouble for them.
I still had the long flight cross-country. I was in the air for four and a half hours, without Internet access, on our way to our stopover in St. Louis. That’s my definition of hell, especially at a time when every minute counts (and the in-flight movie stars Ashton Kutcher).
Then I got off the plane. There were twenty-five to thirty people waiting for me at the terminal, all carrying signs about the ACORN scandal. This wasn’t my final stop—this was a stopover, and they were out there waiting for me to congratulate me. I didn’t even know how they’d found me, or what I was being congratulated for. Then somebody told me: the Census had de-linked from ACORN. Census Bureau director Robert Groves wrote a letter to ACORN in which he explained that “recent events concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with our partnership efforts.” Census Bureau spokesman Stephen Buckner told the press, “Their affiliation caused sufficient concern with the general public [that their continued participation would be] a distraction from our mission, and would maybe even be a discouragement” to Americans participating.3
When we finally got to Quincy and the Tea Party itself, the crowd was raucous. At least a third of the signs were targeting ACORN. The story was exploding.
It was clear that this wasn’t just an A story, this was an A+ story—ACORN’s reaction had guaranteed us that. The political class was noticing the story, and the mainstream media could pretend not to notice, but the water was already up to their waists.
When I listened to my voice mail, there was one from Sean Hannity. “Andrew,” he said, “you need to come up to New York.”
I whispered to myself, “Wow. This thing just jumped another notch.”
For media types, despite all the talk of decentralizing the news business (including my own), the island of Manhattan remains the promised land. The major networks, Fox News, the other cable news outlets, the major newsmagazines—all remain cloistered together in this leftie hothouse dedicated to one-upmanship. Baltimore and DC are big towns, but the world pays attention to what happens in Manhattan, and for the ACORN story to truly hit the stratosphere—to truly swamp Ye Olde Media—we would have to flood the Big Apple.
Bertha Lewis certainly helped. She responded to the Day Two drop by claiming that Hannah and James had been kicked out of ACORN’s Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York offices. “This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen,” she responded on Fox. This was, quite simply, a lie, and now, with videos from all those locations in hand, we knew we had them. It was time to take this road show to Broadway.
Lewis teed up the New York City video better than I could have imagined. With a pimp-and-prostitute photo in hand disproving her assertion that the New York ACORN office had resisted James’s pitch, I made a call to a top executive at the New York Post. By this point, the story was really gaining momentum, and I was feeling confident if I offered the print exclusive to the Post, they’d run the story the following Monday morning. They did it. And so for two days, Monday and Tuesday, Hannah and James were plastered on the front page in newsstands across New York City, the stories inarguably disproving every defense ACORN was mustering. Talk about assaulting the Old Media: the story was now simply unavoidable. The smile on my face, hunkered in my secret Manhattan hotel like some New Media seditionist, was from knowing that even in their townhouses and limousines, Pinch Sulzberger and Jonathan Klein and Katie Couric could ignore this no longer.
While in retrospect the ACORN rollout appears—even to me—seamlessly choreographed and executed, in actuality it was two of the craziest weeks of my life. If any of us got more than three hours of sleep any night, I’d be surprised. It was all a roller-coaster blur of travel, phone calls, e-mails, offers, pitches, and threats. The phone would ring, you’d answer it, and suddenly the story—and our lives—would keep accelerating. We held it together because we believed in what we were doing, believed that the people we were exposing were the tip of the corrupt, venal, leftist spear for whom America was nothing more than a deserving victim. We also held it together because we had a special team.
While I had already met James, I actually met Hannah Giles for the first time in New York. All three of us—James, Hannah, and I—were staying at the same hotel in different rooms. I could tell right away that we were going to get along. She was ebullient, a trouper to beat all troupers. She was immediately my friend and my fellow warrior, and even though twenty years separated us, I said to myself, I think this person understands what is going on here and can handle it.
James was in a different boat. While we were blood brothers because of the story, James was a creative genius—but also a mess. He had to edit all the videos for release, often to different specifications for different news outlets, so if I was sleep-deprived during all this, James was a full-on zombie. As we pressed on all fronts, I was actually worried about his health.
Hannah started going on TV and started to win over the audience. That was an X-factor we hadn’t planned on; that the beautiful young woman playing a prostitute in the videos would come across as so poised, grounded, and mature on television. The first time Larry and I saw Hannah appearing on the Glenn Beck show, we turned to each other and said, “This is masterful.” Hannah played it all so well, letting the videos tell the story, driving home the key points with pithy phrases. This wasn’t a snotty kid playing “Gotcha!” Here was a serious young woman who understood what she was doing, and what was more: she wasn’t afraid.
As for James: Apparently he had been burned before by partners who got lots of media attention. He had collaborated with other conservatives, and they had often gotten the credit, and I knew that he wanted this story to be the beginning of his career and his notoriety in the same way I wanted to be recognized for my understanding of how the media work. And I wanted it for him. He deserved it.
That was why I knew I had to manage the story down to its most minute detail. It really was an extraordinary accomplishment to get James to understand that he had to give me full transcripts and audio so that we could do due diligence, to ensure that everything was aligned and in sequence. I had to win his trust, and despite his youth James was quite cynical on that score. Ultimately, James agreed to it, but it ran contrary to what he had done in the past. I told James I’d ensure he got the full credit he was due, but I also told him they were going to hold us to standards to which they don’t hold 60 Minutes or Dateline NBC. He had to give up some control—so that I could trust him as well.
So when the story broke, while I was on television translating for the public Mike Flynn’s expertise in the Democratic machine’s relationship with corrupt “community organizers,” James was hunched over a computer in a cluttered hotel room preparing the video that would support that analysis. Neither piece worked nearly as well without the other, and none of it worked unless we totally trusted each other. It was a bond formed in the media war trenches. This side of Afghanistan, you can’t get tighter than that.
On Monday morning, we released the New York ACORN video.
Our world detonated.
As I previously mentioned, we had worked over the weekend with the New York Post to give them the print exclusive on the New York video. We felt that the third video was going to be the charm, because once people realized there was a third video, they’d think there was a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a hundredth. The fact that the third video was New York—and the fact that the Post put a lurid shot of James and Hannah on the cover in their pimp and prostitute outfits—just opened the floodgates. That day, the Brooklyn DA’s office said they would investigate ACORN for possible criminality. It was everywhere, and as the talk of criminal charges surfaced, the mainstreamers could no longer afford to ignore it. This story just wouldn’t be confined to regional newspapers and talk radio. It was national. The only question was who in the Old Media would be the first to crack.
The next day, we did it again. We released the Riverside, California, video, in which Tresa Kaelke tried to help James and Hannah, and told a story about how she had murdered an ex-husband. Kaelke encouraged them to set up the brothel, offering to help. An
d again, it made the cover of the New York Post. Two days, two walk-off homers.
That day, Congress voted to defund ACORN. It wasn’t even close—the House voted 345–75, and the Senate voted 85–11 to end ACORN’s cash flow. The Democrats largely did it to cover their asses, but at least one Democrat seemed truly upset. “I am outraged at the actions of ACORN’s employees and believe they should be penalized to the full extent of the law,” said Rep. Zack Space (D-OH). “Our government must be vigilant in ensuring that organizations that are found to act fraudulently do not receive taxpayer dollars.”4
That same day, the media reported that Bill Clinton had gotten together over lunch with Barack Obama. These two are not friends. It was Clinton who suggested to Ted Kennedy that Kennedy had endorsed Obama “because he’s black.” It was Clinton who told Kennedy that “a few years ago this guy would have been getting us coffee.” Now he was sitting across the table from Obama—supposedly discussing health care.
Now, why would Obama discuss health care with the guy who had failed to get health care passed in the early days of his presidency?
I firmly believe that Obama wasn’t there to discuss health care. Here we were, six days after Obama’s “reset” on health care before the joint session of Congress, and the ACORN scandal was on the cover of the Post. It was on TV. It was everywhere. We had released four videos. By Tuesday, Obama clearly was paying attention to the fact that his organization was under siege. He was aware of the fact that his Complex was lying every step of the way and getting nailed in the lies; he was aware of the fact that the media—his media—were getting nailed when they accepted Bertha Lewis and ACORN’s ludicrous excuses. How many more days could new video come out, and the press provide cover for them? Obama knew it had to end.
Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 17