The next salvo in the cinematic campaign war of 2004 is “The Big Picture,” a documentary film attacking John Kerry sponsored by David Bossie’s Citizens United, the right-wing group that unsuccessfully sued to stop national advertising of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” But Bossie’s latest project could create legal problems for him and his organization — in part because Lionel Chetwynd, the award-winning director, is working not only on the documentary but also on two shorter films to be screened at the Republican National Convention.
The director’s simultaneous involvement in both the convention films and the Bossie documentary raises eyebrows among campaign finance experts, because Citizens United is a tax-exempt foundation legally restricted from “coordinating” its “independent” political broadcasts or messages with the Bush-Cheney campaign or the Republican National Committee. If Chetwynd, Bossie, or anyone else working on “The Big Picture” discussed that project with RNC officials or the Bush-Cheney reelection committee, they could be violating the law.
“This kind of common vendor arrangement would raise serious questions about whether the law’s coordination restrictions are being complied with,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan organization that advocates stronger enforcement of the campaign finance laws. “That is a factual question that has to be determined by the appropriate enforcement authorities.”
The mere hiring of Chetwynd to work on both projects may be enough to spark an official probe, says Trevor Potter, a former Federal Election Commission member. “Given the facts here, there’s certainly enough for somebody to file a complaint with the FEC alleging impermissible contributions, expenditures or coordination,” Potter said. “Whether an investigation would bear out that complaint, it would focus on whether there was coordination between the RNC and the filmmaker on the [Citizens United] film.” But Potter, who practices election law in Washington, also pointed out that the FEC rules are sufficiently vague and permissive to allow a “common vendor” like Chetwynd to work for both the RNC and Citizens United under some circumstances.
An outline of the “The Big Picture” obtained by Salon suggests that the Citizens United documentary will offer not only a staunch defense of Bush but also an aggressive attack on Kerry, including a recitation of various smears having to do with his medal-winning military history put forward lately by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The outline portrays the Democratic nominee as the preferred candidate of such “foreign leaders” as Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il and the Nicaraguan Sandinista Party, and as an “appeaser” of European powers deemed corrupt and hostile to U.S. interests — especially France. Virtually all the world’s other nations are solidly behind Bush and the war in Iraq, according to the outline, which labors to disprove allegations that Bush “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida.
Chetwynd, widely known as one of the Bush administration’s most fervent advocates in the movie industry, serves on the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. He also happens to be a friend of political strategist Karl Rove. Last year, Chetwynd directed Showtime’s “DC 9/11: Time of Crisis,” a semi-fictionalized docudrama about the White House response to the terrorist attacks (described in the Washington Post by reviewer Tom Shales as “primitive propaganda” and “a reelection campaign movie”). Now, while he toils on the Citizens United documentary at a studio in North Hollywood, he is also preparing two films to be screened at the Republican National Convention, according to Daily Variety. The first is a “tribute” to the late President Ronald Reagan, for whom Chetwynd once served as a speechwriter. The second is a “toast to George W. Bush.”
Listed as the writer-director of “The Big Picture” on a staff list for the film obtained by Salon, Chetwynd failed to return calls seeking comments. So did Bossie and Craig Haffner, the CEO of Greystone Television, whose facilities are being used to produce “The Big Picture.” The Aug. 3 staff list for the film shows the North Hollywood address and telephone numbers for Greystone, which has produced dozens of cable documentaries. The same list also gives contact information for executive producer Bossie and Citizens United vice president Michael Boos at their organization’s offices in Washington, under the heading “Production — East Coast.”
Bossie, of course, has enjoyed a long and mostly successful career creating propaganda against Democrats. He and Floyd Brown, his mentor at Citizens United, lured dozens of Washington journalists into the Whitewater fiasco with unsubstantiated charges and misinterpreted documents. After the Republicans took over Congress, he moved into “investigative” posts on Capitol Hill, where he faithfully carried out the GOP leadership’s policy of perpetually harassing the Clinton administration, with or without plausible evidence. In 1998, however, he overreached with the release of tapes of imprisoned former Clinton associate Webster Hubbell’s remarks about Hillary Clinton. When it turned out that the tapes had been heavily edited to make them sound incriminating rather than innocent, Bossie was fired.
Hints of the Citizens United film project first emerged in early July, when Bossie warned what he and his organization would do if the Federal Election Commission dismissed their “Fahrenheit 9/11″ complaint. “Citizens United becomes a documentary factory,” he told the New York Post. “We’ll make documentaries and we’ll show ads for them. I’m in the production business … I can put together a documentary very, very quickly.”
Ironically, Bossie and Citizens United could find themselves facing the same legal questions they raised about “Fahrenheit 9/11,” when they tried to stop TV advertising for the Moore opus. Their complaint to the FEC alleged that such ads constituted prohibited “electioneering communications” against Bush and violated federal restrictions on “soft money.” Last month the FEC ruled in favor of the film’s distributors because those ads appeared more than four months before the election, during a window when they were permissible.
But the Bossie film will be released within the 120-day pre-election period when such “independent” electioneering communications are prohibited, unless they fall under an exception carved out for commercial media endeavors. Unless “The Big Picture” is billed as a commercial movie intended to earn a profit, it could fall within the category of prohibited electioneering activity. And advertising for the pro-Bush documentary could pose the same questions raised by Citizens United about the promotion of Moore’s film.
Even if the filmmakers behind “The Big Picture” have avoided any unlawful coordination with the RNC or the Bush-Cheney campaign, their movie may yet embarrass Bossie and Chetwynd’s friends in the White House.
The structure of the film, assuming that it follows the outline obtained by Salon, will be a methodical and ham-handed refutation of the “Anybody but Bush” arguments attributed to Moore, from the issue of the “stolen” 2000 election to the debate over the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. The true villains in all those controversies, it claims, are Democrats Bill Clinton, Al Gore and, of course, John Kerry.
Among the familiar personalities mentioned as possibly appearing in the film are Solicitor General Ted Olson and his late wife Barbara; actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson, who has appeared in a previous Citizens United ad; syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer; former CIA director James Woolsey; and Florida Rep. Porter Goss, recently nominated as the next CIA director. (A less familiar interview subject, apparently named Ivan Pedanski, is cited as a source on Iraq’s disappearing weapons of mass destruction because he would say that the “stuff [is] buried in the ground in Syria.”)
An earlier version of the script outline, titled “Initial Notes,” promised a more vicious and possibly more comical film. Among the anti-Bush canards mentioned there but omitted from the later outline is that “Bush is a moron.” It argues that the president cannot be both a moron and a “devious mastermind attempting to spread US hegemony worldwide” — and claims that “Bush did well at Yale.”
That version of the script indicated the film’s second half would be devoted to “deconstructing John Kerry” — beginning with the character assault mounted by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and mocking him as the “Knight of the Woeful Countenance.” It also makes the false assertion that Kerry “never went on to post-grad work” after Yale. (Researchers hired by Bossie presumably will discover that Kerry graduated from Boston College law school in 1976.)
Exactly how “The Big Picture” was financed, and how much it will cost, remain mysterious. A tantalizing clue, however, showed up in a July 19 post on the right-wing Free Republic Web site, where someone nicknamed Smogger sought guidance from fellow Freepers about a political donation:
“Who is Dave Bossie and Citizens United?” asked Smogger. “I just gave them $50 that they claim they are going to use to create a movie to praise the efforts of George Bush and to counter Farenheit 911 [sic]. They said they were trying to raise $500,000 in 30 days for this effort. I assume they got my number from the RNC.
“Anyone else receive this phone solicitation? It’s so hard to keep track with GWB and RNC calling every other day. I tried to access the Citizens United website but it appears down. I hope I did the right thing.”
Dozens of America’s wealthiest taxpayers — including hedge fund legend Michael Steinhardt, super trial lawyer Guy Saperstein, and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s fame — have appealed to President Obama not to renew the Bush tax cuts for anyone earning more than $1 million a year. Calling themselves “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength,” the 40-plus signers today launched a website and a campaign that they hope will draw support from others who agree that fiscal responsibility should begin with those who can best afford it — as their letter to Obama explains:
We are writing to urge you to stand firm against those who would put politics ahead of their country.
For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you allow tax cuts on incomes over $1,000,000 to expire at the end of this year as scheduled.
We make this request as loyal citizens who now or in the past earned an income of $1,000,000 per year or more.
We have done very well over the last several years. Now, during our nation’s moment of need, we are eager to do our fair share. We don’t need more tax cuts, and we understand that cutting our taxes will increase the deficit and the debt burden carried by other taxpayers. The country needs to meet its financial obligations in a just and responsible way.
Letting tax cuts for incomes over $1,000,000 expire, is an important step in that direction.
The Patriotic Millionaires campaign, pulled together quickly by the Agenda Project in New York City, just happens to appear on the same day as a new study from the Center for Responsive Politics revealing that half of the members of the House and the Senate are millionaires. That contrasts sharply with the general population, of whom fewer than 1 percent can claim millionaire status.
Not surprisingly, some of the super-rich declined to join the Patriotic Millionaires when the Agenda Project reached out to them. At least two airily dismissed the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and above — which will cost well over $700 billion over the coming decade — as “small potatoes.” And a Manhattan hedge fund billionaire said he believes the cuts should be extended and added that “the moneys should be used to pay down debt” — which sounds like the magical Republican plan to simultaneously cut taxes, wage war and drastically reduce the deficit. The same investor also complained that “anyone who has money is made to feel that they’re bad.”
Bad? Only if they’d rather force Grandma to eat cat food than pay their fair share.
On the same day that the House Ethics Committee convicted Rep. Charles Rangel of nearly a dozen violations of congressional rules, Sen. Mitch McConnell announced that under pressure from fellow Republicans, he will surrender his beloved earmarks. This is a notable coincidence because, like Rangel, McConnell has rewarded corporate donors to an academic center named after him — and used earmarks for that purpose. The top corporate recipient of earmarks from the Kentucky Republican in the 2010 budget not only happens to be a donor to the McConnell Center for Political Leadership at the University of Louisville, but one of the largest and most corrupt defense contractors in the world.
Topping the list of Rangel’s transgressions was the misuse of his congressional clout to raise money for a vanity academic “center” named after him at the City University of New York from private donors. Yet somehow McConnell got away with the same kind of dubious dealings at the University of Louisville — and was allowed to reward BAE Systems, donor of $500,000 to the McConnell Center, with $17 million worth of defense earmarks.
For years, the long list of corporate donors to the university’s McConnell Center for Political Leadership was kept secret, presumably out of deference to the senator and his well-heeled friends, including Toyota, AIG, RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris, among others. Perhaps the most questionable gift came from United Defense, a subsidiary of BAE Systems, the Pentagon contractor that finally settled a huge, transatlantic bribery case with the Justice Department last spring. United Defense gave $500,000 to the McConnell Center, and the senator has continued to perform for the company ever since, even while BAE was subject to a federal investigation that led to a record $450 million fine and three years of monitoring by a court-appointed “compliance officer.” Ironically, the chief accusations against BAE involved bribery of public officials (in Saudi Arabia, not Kentucky).
Everyone knew that BAE was suspected of serious corruption — and under investigation not only here but in Britain and Austria as well — when McConnell sponsored $25 million of earmarks for the company back in 2007. By the time he pushed through the FY 2010 earmarks last year, both the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office and the Justice Department were preparing to file criminal charges. BAE’s sales tactics in the Mideast and Central Europe were not only crooked but interfered with American oversight of sensitive defense technology, according to Justice Department officials.
So while McConnell and his caucus are (temporarily and reluctantly) giving up their power to reward dubious donors like BAE with earmarks, it is hard not to wonder how the stringent “reformers” of the Tea Party can support his reelection as Republican leader.
How Darrell Issa will conduct the vital business of the House Oversight Committee when he takes over as chairman isn’t clear yet. When the California Republican describes his plans in the mainstream media, he strives to sound reasonable, bipartisan and public-spirited; but when speaking with media outlets and personalities, such as Rush Limbaugh, he sounds like a hard-line right-winger aiming to revive the paranoid partisan style of the Gingrich era — which would be more in keeping with the reputation he has already established. He displayed the fugue state that preoccupies him when he denounced President Obama on CNN as “the most corrupt” occupant of the Oval Office in modern times – and then withdrew that accusation with an apology.
Now Issa has announced that he expects the Oversight committee and its subcommittees to hold nearly three times as many investigative hearings over the next two years as Henry Waxman, an active and successful chairman, ran during the final years of the Bush administration. He may consider the federal government (and the White House) to be bottomless pits of waste, fraud and abuse, but are there really three times as many troubling issues for Issa and his colleagues to study now as there were in the Bush years?
The answer is yes, so long as the threshold for investigation is absurdly low, such as the question of whether federal agencies are spending too much money on signs to identify construction projects funded by stimulus money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Road signs displaying the names of various government officials and agencies are neither new nor scandalous, but local Republicans have been whining about the erection of signs bearing the president’s name and the Recovery Act logo as examples of Soviet-style propaganda. For months, Issa has been riding this issue, promoting stories in local newspapers that suggest waste, wrongdoing and political misuse of funds, with hints that the Recovery Act symbol bears a suspicious resemblance to the 2008 Obama campaign logo. Last August, World Net Daily, which did so much to promote phony scandals a decade ago, urged its gullible readers to “report” the ARRA signs to Issa’s office (under the byline of the foul-mouthed Swift boat hoaxter Jerome Corsi).
This week, Issa indicated that he will continue to pursue such small-time, seemingly bogus concerns with a tweet linking to an article complaining about stimulus project signage in the Greeley Gazette: “Citizen-watchdogs & new technology made this (http://tinyurl.com/28egdr5) possible … how can we do more of this? Would love your thoughts.”
It is hard to imagine that road signs represent more than a minuscule fraction of 1 percent of the $787 billion stimulus budget, but then again Republicans constantly bemoan minor spending items — such as congressional earmarks — that actually have almost no real fiscal impact. Perhaps their budgetary record is historically so miserable because they just can’t do the arithmetic. But that can scarcely be true of Issa, an entrepreneur who earned his own huge fortune and is still the wealthiest member of Congress.
Certainly Issa should provide serious oversight of the stimulus spending, which is a fundamental congressional responsibility assigned to his committee. He ought to stop taking potshots at road signs — and instead start examining the administration’s record in selecting and contracting projects.
Of course, that might not be quite as much fun as stirring up the Tea Party rubes with diversions like the road sign “issue.” According to the independent watchdogs at Pro Publica and Politifact, the administration has succeeded in contracting stimulus projects at considerably lower cost than originally anticipated so far. Lower bidding has meant millions of dollars saved, with those saved funds in turn financing thousands of additional projects — and many thousands of jobs — across the country.
Long before the dismal results of Tuesday’s election were complete, one especially dog-eared bit of guidance for President Obama was getting wide circulation in the mainstream: He must now emulate Bill Clinton, who “shifted to the center” after the electoral debacle of November 1994, “triangulated” his way to compromise with the Republicans, and won a second term.
Among the reasons why such advice is outdated and useless, the most obvious may be that Obama’s position today is stronger than Clinton’s after 1994. Today, unlike then, the Democrats can look forward to retaining control of the Senate. But there are two other overriding reasons why Obama shouldn’t seek to imitate Clinton by immediately seeking compromises with the Republicans.
The first is that he has tried vainly from the beginning of his presidency to engage the Republicans in negotiation over vital reforms, only to learn again and again that they aren’t really interested in anything but sabotage. The second is that compromising with the Republicans isn’t exactly what Clinton did — or not at first, anyway. Before he could do anything else, he had to push back.
Yes, Clinton made a rhetorical gesture toward the Gingrich “revolution” when he said that “the era of big government is over.” As things turned out, however, that remark was studded with asterisks, footnotes, and exceptions that gave “big government” a meaning entirely different from the standard conservative interpretation. Yes, he eventually signed a welfare reform bill — ending the family support entitlement “as we know it” — which he had promised to do in his 1992 campaign (although he later emended many of that bill’s worst features). And yes, he sought to balance the federal budget at a time when that seemed a heresy to the Democratic base.
Yet the most important political events in the first year following the ’94 midterm were not compromises over policy, but confrontations that swiftly became disruptive, angry, polarizing — and that Clinton won. When the Gingrich Republicans twice shut down the government at the end of 1995 in order to win their way on the budget, the president faced them down and portrayed them as right-wing extremists whose ideology portended chaos. He kept that message alive not only as he confronted the Republicans in Washington, but in a series of stealthy political commercials heralding his reelection bid that started airing in the summer of 1995, nearly a year and a half before the 1996 election.
Therein lies the pointed lesson that Obama might learn from his Democratic predecessor, and use to navigate the political and economic landscape after the midterm. What worked so well for Clinton was to recognize public concern over the leviathan of spending — and to defend popular social, health, and environmental programs at the same time.
Similarly, Obama can acknowledge the importance of long-term deficit reduction, while challenging the Republicans to show how balance can be achieved without taxing the wealthy whose pockets they invariably protect. The answer is that it can be done only with big tax increases on everyone else and programmatic cutbacks that would raise howls of protest from many Republican constituencies — starting with the elderly and rural voters that gave them their latest victory.
While the president need not endorse every recommendation of his bipartisan fiscal advisory commission — dubbed the “Catfood Commission” for its expected endorsement of cuts in Social Security — he can use their findings to insist that the House Republicans no longer attempt to “repeal arithmetic,” as Clinton himself often put it during this campaign.
Against that background, Obama should insist that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the incoming House Budget committee chair, name the specific programs that he thinks should be cut to finance continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent.
He should make sure Ryan explains that his plan would not simply cut Medicare costs — a feature of the health reform bill that Republicans have loudly opposed all year – but would actually abolish Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program altogether and replace those programs with inadequate private vouchers. He should tweak Ryan over the remarkable “bailout” provision in his Social Security proposal, which would leave taxpayers responsible for ensuring that privatized accounts be guaranteed against stock market declines, a vast potential liability that represents a gigantic gift to those same Wall Street houses supposedly hated by the Tea Party.
Perhaps most important, the president should ask Ryan to outline his plan for a 23 percent value-added tax — the equivalent of a national sales tax — while cutting taxes to historic lows for the very top brackets. He should question how the Ryan plan will reduce the deficit, when experts say it will actually make matters much worse. And he can point out that his own tax cuts, which were part of the stimulus package, were far more broad-based and fair.
By emphasizing those issues in the context of a budget-balancing debate, Obama can underline contradictions between the Tea Party radicals and the Republican establishment. By doing so, he may even tempt the Tea Party to overreach for another government shutdown, even though John Boehner (R-Ohio) , the incoming House Speaker, has vowed not to step into that trap again.
Perhaps he won’t — and perhaps he won’t be pushed by the Tea Party. But Obama should nevertheless seek to draw contrasts at every step, using his rhetorical gifts to outline the extremist Republican policies that an overwrought and furious electorate never meant to endorse. If he can competently expose what is behind the false promises of his Congressional opponents — who remain considerably less popular than he is — then the fickle independents will start to turn away from them, the enthusiasm gap will shrink, and he will have taken the first step toward reelection.
As Bill Clinton began the last day of the midterm campaign on a chilly morning in Saratoga Springs, not far from New York’s border with Canada, he confided jokingly that he had originally expected only “to do a few events this year to honor the people who had supported us,” noting that his wife, as secretary of state, is prohibited by law and custom from partisan politicking.
“This is my 127th event,” he recalled as the crowd of 1500 upstate Democrats laughed appreciatively. “And I’ve kept going because I am so concerned that in the fact-free environment of this election, people are going to choose exactly what they don’t want.” That concern spurred him on a grueling, 18-hour series of jet hops from two stops in the northern reaches of his adopted state on to McKeesport, Pennsylvania, then Beckley, West Virginia, Louisville, Kentucky, and finally Orlando, Florida for a late-night rally.
The former president always draws enthusiastic crowds, and they listened raptly to his latest political pitch, which included point by point explanations of the student loan reform, healthcare reform and the banking bill to his argument that he and his fellow Democrats — not the Republicans — deserve the affections of the Tea Party.
Repeatedly, he complained about the “cowardice” of the “Anonymously financed advertising” that has targeted Democratic candidates, courtesy of Karl Rove and the Supreme Court — and the real reasons why the funders of those ads want to remain unknown. “When I was growing up, my mother always told me that if I had a problem with someone, I should go straight up to them, put my shoulders back, make sure they knew my name, and say whatever I had to say — and not sneak around behind somebody’s back,” he said as he stood beside West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, the embattled Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. “The reason they don’t want you to know who’s paying for those ads against Joe is because if you knew who they were, it would make you more likely to vote for him.”
Like most Clinton speeches, the final version of his midterm pitch included pithy riffs on broad variety of policy issues — because, as he said later on the plane, the American people “are starving for explanations. They want someone to tell them what the hell is going on. And in the present media environment it is imperative to repeat the same message again and again for anyone to hear it.”
The reason that Democrats face such dire prospects in this campaign, he continued, is that the party’s elected leaders have spent the past year enduring a crescendo of attacks from Republican politicians and right-wing media — without answering them. He seemed mystified that the Democratic leaders had done so little to justify and promote their legislative achievements, which he has been touting at every stop. Conceding that “we made mistakes” that led to his party’s loss of 54 House seats in the 1994 midterm, he added that “now we know a midterm election can be nationalized and should act accordingly.”
That is why he tried to frame the election as a set of choices between destructive Republican policies that favor “people like me, who make more than a million dollars a year” and the great majority of Americans who don’t. In full populist mode, he concluded nearly every stop with a riff on fiscal responsibility, recent presidential history, and the false consciousness of the Tea Party.
“Last weekend, I read a touching story article about two ladies who started the Tea Party movement,” he said, referring to a profile in the Wall Street Journal. “They were outraged by the bailout. And who wasn’t? President Bush told me that signing the bailout made him sick.”
Yet the bank reform bill pushed through by the White House and the Democrats, against Republican opposition, will “outlaw” future bailouts and make financial executives and shareholders pay if they recklessly squander their assets. “So why would the Tea Party support the Republicans, who have promised to repeal that bill because their friends on Wall Street don’t like it?” he wondered.
But beyond that, he said, the Tea Party ought to look more closely at the past 28 years of American history before they reject the Democrats and embrace the Republicans. “During the 12 years before I took office, the Republicans quadrupled the national debt,” he said. “I balanced the budget after four years and left a surplus that would have erased the national debt by 2015 if they had left my budget in place.” Instead, the second Bush administration doubled the national debt again, bequeathed the nation a series of future deficits — and failed to create one-tenth as many jobs as Clinton did, while shrinking the size of government as a portion of the national economy.
And, he noted, it was President Obama and the Democrats in Congress who have actually cut taxes for most Americans in the stimulus bill — not the Republicans. If the Tea Party movement wants more jobs, balanced budgets, lower taxes and smaller government, he insisted, they should be supporting Democrats.
“Where is the love?” he cried. “I ought to be the Tea Party’s poster child.”
The crowds roared every time.
Grabbing money isolated on white background(Credit: Andrii Lychak) 
U.S. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) listens during remarks about leadership elections on Capitol Hill in Washington, November 16, 2010. REUTERS/Jim Young (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS)(Credit: Reuters) 
Darrell Issa 
Bill Clinton returns a salute to the crowd as he stumps for Governor Joe Manchin in Beckley, W.Va., on Monday. Manchin is running against John Raese for the vacant seat of the late Sen. Robert Byrd. 