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politics and politicians Title: The man behind Ted CruzÂ’s tricks The man behind Ted Cruz’s tricks The 2016 contender is under fire for tactics tied to Jeff Roe. By Shane Goldmacher | 02/29/16 05:04 AM EST Jeff Roe's calling card has long been win-at-all-costs campaigning. Ted Cruz likes to say “personnel is policy,” but the single most important personnel decision he’s made on the 2016 presidential campaign has become his most controversial. Cruz has carefully built his brand on trustworthiness — he stands almost daily in front of signs that read “TrusTED” — but in selecting his campaign manager, Cruz tapped a take-no-prisoners operative well practiced in political dark arts. Those who have crossed Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, say things like he’s “mean” and a “master of sleazy politics.” He’s also an indisputably talented tactician who has guided Cruz from an asterisk early in the race to one of its finalists. But his calling card has long been win-at-all-costs campaigning. And now those accusations are ricocheting against Cruz. As Cruz enters Super Tuesday — “the most important day of this entire primary election,” Cruz said Sunday, when a slate of Southern states long seen as the linchpin to his nomination will vote — his opponents have successfully raised questions about Cruz’s own ethics and honesty, repeatedly calling him a “liar” and accusing him of “dirty tricks.” Along the way, Cruz has lost his base, evangelical Christians, to Donald Trump in three straight states. “You bring a king cobra into your bed? You better be a mongoose, that’s all I can say. You bring pure evil into your home. You are who you hang with,” said Cathy Rinehart, a Democrat who ran against Roe’s old boss, Republican Rep. Sam Graves, in 2002. Rinehart says Roe’s political team hounded her in public with cameras (she contacted the police; no charges were filed). “He’s a son of a bitch,” she said, and questioned Cruz’s judgment in hiring him. “Ted standing there all saying I’m this pious fundamentalist Christian, and it’s like then you bring in Jeff Roe and he does tactics like that — maybe they’re not illegal, but it’s immoral.” Indeed, as Cruz’s opponents have sought to smudge the senator’s clean Christian image and question his integrity, they have used Roe’s ruthless past as a cudgel. From the false alert the campaign sent out that Ben Carson was suspending his campaign as the Iowa caucuses began to the voter-violation mailer that the Iowa secretary of state condemned to a Photoshop-altered image of Marco Rubio and Barack Obama, they have pointed to Roe’s hidden hand in supposedly guiding Cruz into the gutter. Roe and the Cruz campaign declined to comment for this story. Cruz was intimately familiar with Roe’s aggressive tactics before he hired him. He’d been on the receiving end in 2012, when Roe was the direct-mail consultant for Cruz’s Senate primary opponent. One Roe-produced mailer so incensed Cruz that he pulled it out as a prop during a debate and denounced his opponent for daring to “impugn my patriotism.” About two years later, Cruz hired him. Today, Roe runs the Cruz operation with militaristic efficiency. He sends emails and texts at all hours and calls impromptu staff meetings by sounding the siren on a bullhorn. Last summer, in the Houston heat, he wouldn’t turn on the air-conditioning in the office after it automatically shut down at 6 p.m. because it would cost an extra $130 an hour to keep it running. “I said, ‘Buy a fan. We’ll buy fans for everybody,’” Roe told reporters in January. He’s kept a lean staff. Roe likes to brag that the day Rick Perry fired all but one of his aides in Iowa last summer, Cruz still had only one paid staffer there. The frugality has paid off. In the past three financial reports, Cruz has had more cash on hand than any of his rivals. Perhaps more significantly, Roe has won Cruz’s trust, and the two are in regular contact, both when Roe is in the office and when he travels with Cruz. Candidates who hire Roe get not just a bare-knuckle brawler but a pointy-headed, data-driven chief executive. The Cruz campaign has invested millions in analytics to model the electorate and identify their voters. Roe’s team has built out a vaunted grass-roots turnout program that is so respected by his rivals that even when internal polls show a toss-up, they fear they’re actually behind. And, as Cruz rarely fails to remind audiences, he is the only candidate to beat Trump so far. Indeed, Roe’s fingerprints are all over the Cruz candidacy — the good and the bad. “It’s the difference between being a wartime general and a peace-time general,” said Todd Graves, a former U.S. attorney in Missouri whom Roe served as campaign manager when he previously ran for statewide office. “Jeff is someone who is a wartime general. And when it’s time to take the battlefield, he organizes the troops and takes the hill.” But while Cruz had long said he wanted to obey Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment — to not attack fellow Republicans — he hired a campaign general with one political commandment: win at all costs. “I don’t think he would ever do anything unlawful,” Dave Drebes, who writes a subscription blog on Missouri politics, said of Roe. “But I do think he’d do anything lawful to win.” Roe’s biography only adds to his legend. He grew up on a hog farm, knee-deep in the northern Missouri muck, and as a teen joined the National Guard, where he went on to man a howitzer crew. He spent years as an aspiring baseball umpire, where calls are “out” or “safe,” even as he worked in the gray area of politics. Today, he’s a tobacco-chewing father of a daughter named Remington (as in the gun manufacturer, which he also named one of his businesses after) and married to a former Mrs. Missouri United States. “If you’re going to throw a punch, he’s going to pull out a knife. If I pull out a gun, he’s going to go get a tank. If I pull out tank, he’s going to pull out even more dynamite,” said Rod Jetton, a former Missouri state House speaker who jostled with Roe for political clients before his career as a strategist unraveled in scandal. “You’re not going to whip this guy. He’s not going to give up. If he has to get mean, he’s going to get mean.” There was the time in 2006 when Roe ran an ad with the letters “XXX” flashing on screen to link the woman running against Graves to pornography because she sold ads for a science magazine printed by the same company that published Penthouse. One of Roe’s opponents that year later took Roe to court for defamation (unsuccessfully), after Roe peddled a story on his blog that the candidate as a teen had drunkenly killed his best friend in a dump-truck accident. (The accidental death had happened, but no drinking was involved.) In perhaps the most wrenching case, in 2015, Roe created and paid for a radio ad himself about gubernatorial candidate Tom Schweich, saying that Democrats would “squash him like the little bug that he is.” Days later, Schweich, haunted by his own demons, would kill himself. Former Missouri Sen. John Danforth, who spoke with Schweich after the ad, blames Roe, at least in part. “Words can kill,” Danforth said in his eulogy. Danforth called Roe a “known slime-monger” in a recent interview. “His reputation is that he is a master of sleazy politics and dirty tricks,” Danforth said. “I don’t support anybody who uses Jeff Roe for anything. I won’t vote for anybody who uses him for anything. I think it speaks to the candidates. The candidates must be responsible for the people they hire.” At least one of Cruz’s foes has seized on the Schweich tragedy. “The campaign manager for Sen. Cruz has actually caused a candidate in Missouri to commit suicide over attack ads,” Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said on Fox News in mid-February. In 2008, Roe produced an ad, slammed as homophobic, that featured a man dressed in fluorescent clothes and dancing with two women, as Graves’ Democratic opponent was slapped for having “San Francisco values.” The first time veteran Missouri Democratic operative Steve Glorioso heard Cruz savage Trump over “New York values,” he reached for his phone and began tapping out a message to Sen. Claire McCaskill. Spread the word, he told her, that this was Roe’s handiwork. Glorioso, who has worked both against and with Roe (on local ballot issues), said he can be softer than his reputation. Last year, a few days after Missouri Democratic strategist Pat Gray passed away, Roe called up Glorioso and suggested they launch a scholarship together in his name at the University of Missouri. And Glorioso said that when Roe learned that Gray’s widow was struggling financially, he raised $10,000 for her. “He’s really a complex fellow, hard-hitting and all,” Glorioso said. For all his work in Missouri, Roe has long wanted to get into the presidential game. In 2008, he drove north on I-35 to the Iowa headquarters of Mike Huckabee’s operation to volunteer in the waning days before the caucuses. Four years later, Roe served as an adviser for Perry’s short-lived campaign. His big chance would come this cycle, as Roe would move, along with his wife, daughter and in-laws, to Houston in dedication to the Cruz cause. To some extent, the grievance-taking against Cruz’s tactics has been excessive, a sign of how campaigns seek to score points by taking umbrage. The Rubio campaign, in particular, has looked to capitalize on Cruz for “dirty tricks.” At an event in Greenville, South Carolina, Rubio senior adviser Todd Harris held a press gaggle and handed out printed copies of the Photoshop-altered image of Rubio and Obama. “Look I’ve seen a lot of negative campaigns in South Carolina and around the country, and the campaign Ted Cruz ran in South Carolina was the nastiest I’ve ever seen,” Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan, himself known as a political knife-fighter, told Politico. (In Iowa, the Rubio campaign produced a mailer too, similar to the controversial Cruz piece, designed to shame less frequent voters. But unlike the Cruz one, it didn’t disclose their neighbors’ names and give them grades on the A to F scale, and it wasn’t stamped, in all capital letters, “VOTING VIOLATION.”) Dave Carney, a veteran GOP strategist, mocked the feigned indignation that has swept the political landscape. “I’m sure Lee Atwater is rolling over in the grave at the accusations of dirty tricks. This is a croquette game,” Carney said. But it seems to have had an impact. Inside the Cruz operation, many believe national spokesman Rick Tyler wouldn’t have been fired last week, except that his sharing of a video misquoting Rubio on social media came after so many other accusations of foul play. As Hogan Gidley, a former adviser to Huckabee who strongly opposes Cruz’s candidacy, said, “When you’re parading yourself around as the paragon of Christian virtue, you better be airtight.” Indeed, after Cruz carried evangelical Christians in Iowa en route to victory, he lost them to Trump in the next three states and barely finished ahead of Rubio among them in South Carolina and Nevada. It’s an ominous sign for Cruz ahead of evangelical-heavy states that vote Tuesday: Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Alabama were supposed to be his political launching pad. As for Roe, one of his aphorisms is that he lives on the windshield of life — not the rearview mirror. After Super Tuesday, it will be clear whether he and the Cruz campaign have turned the corner on questions of ethical politicking or run out of road entirely. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: lana (#0)
Why the oldie moldie post?
потому что Бог хочет это тот путь
Cruz is a sleazeball who will never be President. You will have Trump and a Republican Supreme Court, or you will have Hillary and a Democrat Supreme Court. Take your pick.
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