The new Republican House Majority

Issa and His Aide
Posted by Ryan Lizza

There’s a Politico story out about Kurt Bardella, the spokesman for Congressman Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee and the subject of a recent profile I wrote for The New Yorker.

The Politico story, which was broken by Marin Cogan and Jake Sherman, reported that Issa was investigating whether Bardella forwarded and blind-copied private e-mails to Mark Leibovich, a New York Times reporter who is writing a book about Washington. This afternoon, Issa fired Bardella. (Full disclosure: both Cogan and Leibovich are friends of mine.)

I’m somewhat mystified that Issa required an “investigation” to get to the bottom of this, because inside Issa’s office there was no secret about Bardella’s cooperation. When I was writing my profile of Issa, Bardella openly discussed his cooperation with Leibovich—and not just with me, but with his direct boss as well. For example, during a meeting with Bardella and Issa’s chief of staff, Dale Neugebauer, the three of us had a light-hearted discussion about how extensively Bardella was working with Leibovich.

“So you know about this, right?” I asked Neugebauer.

“Oh yeah. Yeah, he knows,” Bardella said.

“He [Bardella] just got to Washington and he’s got a book about him coming out,” I noted.

“I know, no kidding,” Neugebauer said.

In a later conversation, Bardella told me, “I’ve shared a lot with [Leibovich].” He added, “I have provided him with a lot of content. I BCC him on certain projects that I’m working on.” Bardella said he shared information that shows “this is how it happens” and “this is the conversation I’m having right now.”

“Do the other folks in the office know?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Bardella said, and he gave me an example of the type of stuff he shares: “Here’s this inquiry I got from a reporter. Here’s what I said to my staff about it, here’s the story, here’s the e-mail I just got from so-and-so, another reporter who’s upset that I gave his story to [someone else].”

At another point in one of our conversations, Bardella explained that getting news in partisan outlets— he cited the Daily Caller, the Washington Examiner, and the Washington Times—was easy, but it didn’t have the same impact as getting something in the mainstream press. He explained that he had recently leaked a report on ACORN to the New York Times, which had run what was, in his view, a good story for Issa. He then received an e-mail from an aide to Senator Susan Collins, he said, who complained about not being part of the decision to leak the report. Bardella said that he sent the e-mails documenting the whole drama to Leibovich.

“I blind-copied Mark in my response,” he said, “which was, given that my options were the Examiner or the New York Times, I’m not exactly going to apologize for the result that I just produced that you would not have. You had the report for four days and you didn’t do **** with it.”

While I was trailing Issa at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Bardella elaborated further on the kind of material he was sharing with Leibovich. Here’s a partial transcript of our interview:

KURT BARDELLA: I give him a LOT. I really want him to see what exactly my job is like. One of the biggest [inaudible] misconceptions that drives me crazy is when the press characterizes Darrell as “Darrell, a publicity-seeking whatever.” And Mark has seen—I forwarded him, like, fifty-five e-mails of reporters and producers embarrassingly like begging to have Darrell on. And I said, “Listen, I’m not gonna say that we don’t try to get press, BUT they are enablers and they are as much a part of that if not more so than we are at this point.” I can’t believe these guys are putting this in writing, it’s embarrassing.

RYAN LIZZA: What do they say?

BARDELLA: Oh, “Happy New Year! We love working with you! It’s gonna be an exciting time! We would love to have him on, any time that you have available! Any day! We’ll keep it open for you!” And they’ll do that, like, every two or three days. I’ll say, “No, no.” “Is it something that we did? Are you mad at us? Can we talk about it? Can we come by?”—they are so overly—

LIZZA: Who’s the worst?

BARDELLA: Um—I would say just TV bookers in general are all pretty bad. It cracks me up when MSNBC does it though. I wrote back to them, like, “I just watched your network, like, ream Darrell for, like, nine hours straight, why on earth would I put him on any of your shows?”

LIZZA: Have they gone after him?

BARDELLA: Oh, yeah, it’s, like—certainly, from five o’clock on it’s just a Darrell Issa ripfest. Matthews, Ed Schultz, Olbermann, Rachel Maddow—they dedicate so [inaudible] into bashing Darrell….

The funny thing is when they do the “Can we be your first MSNBC”—they compete against their own shows—so, “Please, don’t put him on this show, they suck and their ratings are horrible, but if you wanna be on ours”—… It’s so petty. I just laugh. You guys gotta do what you gotta do, I get that. But when all of you guys write your “Darrell Issa publicity-seeking hound,” I’m, like, “Remember all of these e-mails here?” Print reporters are the same way.

This long back and forth was the lead-in to a Bardella quote I used in the piece:

[R]eporters e-mail me saying, “Hey, I’m writing this story on this thing. Do you think you guys might want to investigate it? If so, if you get some documents, can you give them to me?” I’m, like, “You guys are going to write that we’re the ones wanting to do all the investigating, but you guys are literally the ones trying to egg us on to do that!”

To me that last quote was one of the most important things Bardella told me. The rest of it—that offices clash over how to leak info and that bookers and reporters are competitive—is interesting but relatively well known, and not very relevant to a piece about Darrell Issa. But that Bardella accused reporters of offering to collaborate with Issa as he launches what will inevitably be partisan investigations of the Obama Administration seemed jaw-dropping. This is exactly the dysfunctional investigator/reporter dynamic that in the nineteen-nineties fed frenzies over every minor Clinton scandal. In his short-lived career, Bardella was witness to the fact that it was all starting over in 2011, now that there was again a Republican House and a Democratic President. From what I know of what Bardella shared, the beat reporters who cover Issa and engaged in this kind of game with Bardella will be the ones most embarrassed by the e-mails that Leibovich possesses.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/03/issa-and-his-aide.html?printable=true&currentPage=all#ixzz1FSbRkmCc

Poll: Public already losing patience with new Congress
By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Once again, the public is getting increasingly disgusted with Washington.

It sees a failure to adopt remedies for even the most basic, pressing issues of the day, as Congress struggles to craft a federal budget. And incumbents are getting worried about the political implications.

"It's hurting some of us," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who's up for re-election next year. "They blame everybody."

A new Pew Research Center poll shows that about half of Americans think the debate over spending and deficits has been "generally rude and disrespectful."

There's even bipartisan agreement — 48 percent of Republicans and Democrats have that view, as well as 57 percent of independents. President Barack Obama signed legislation Friday to provide funding to keep the government open until April 8, the sixth such temporary extension in the 6-month-old fiscal year.

Pew surveyed 1,525 adults from March 8-14. The poll's findings suggest the political losers so far have been Republicans, who rode a wave of voter irritation to win control of the House of Representatives last fall.

After the election, 35 percent said Republicans had a better approach to the deficit, expected to reach a record $1.65 trillion this year. This month, that number has plunged to 21 percent.

People don't think Obama has better ideas, either — 20 percent found his approach better, down from November's 24 percent. Total sample margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The most restless constituency has involved supporters of the conservative tea party movement. After the November election, where backers helped elect dozens of congressional Republicans, three of four movement supporters liked GOP budget plans. This month that figure dropped to 52 percent.

"People are growing impatient," said Carroll Doherty, Pew associate director.

They've been impatient for years. In 2006, voters gave Democrats control of both Houses of Congress for the first time in 12 years. Two years later, Obama, a Democrat, reclaimed the White House for his party after eight years of Republican George W. Bush. Last year, Republicans reclaimed control of the House.

"The American public is getting tired of change elections and then not seeing change. There have been three change elections in a row, but people today figure things are still adrift," said Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducts the McClatchy-Marist poll.

Political veterans are scrambling to educate their constituents about the deliberate pace of Washington.

"People should understand we do things in baby steps," said Tea Party Express co-founder Sal Russo, of Sacramento, Calif. "We have to remind people that while we just had a historic election, the reality is, we're woefully short of 60 votes in the Senate." Democrats control 53 of the Senate's 100 seats.

But Russo's fighting a world where the public can get instant, nonstop, unfiltered access to Congress and commentary.

Republicans had benefited from that openness during the two-year fight over overhauling the nation's health care system. Procedural delays forced major votes to occur after midnight, and in one case, at dawn on Christmas Eve.

GOP opponents used what looked like procedural chaos to portray Democrats as unable to run Congress effectively. Now, though, it's Republicans who are in charge of the House, and they're feeling the heat.

The public doesn't understand all the nuances of the legislative process, so what they see "reinforces the perception that Washington can't get anything done," said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the Rothenberg Report, which follows congressional races.

House Republicans, who have a 241-192 majority, have found it relatively easy to win approval of their major initiatives: repealing the health care law, cutting $61 billion from current-year spending, blocking federal funding for public broadcasting and so on.

The stumbling block has been the Senate. Health care repeal and the $61 billion spending cuts died there, and the effort to defund NPR is also expected to go nowhere.

One way to explain the process, Hatch said, is to stress the value of experience.

He talks about how, in January 2009, veteran pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger steered a disabled US Airways plane into the Hudson River in New York City. The passengers and crew all survived.

"Experience matters," said Hatch, "and when you explain that, it makes people stop and think."

What may help incumbents more are two developments.

One is that, unlike the health care fight, the budget battle isn't dominating headlines. Since the start of 2011, three stories have gotten the most attention: The Jan. 8 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat; the Middle East turmoil, and Japan's earthquake and tsunami.

"Washington's fights have not broken through as a top story," said Doherty of Pew.

Even if they do, the 2012 elections are a long way off. Health care legislation won final approval a year ago, during the primary season.

But if the economy rebounds strongly this year, or a grand budget compromise is reached, process chaos could be long forgotten. In that case, said Gonzales, "results will matter most."

But if the economy continues to stumble, or the budget fight drags on and on, the fractured process could matter a lot.

"If the government shuts down," said Gonzales, "no one really knows what the political fallout will be."

How could they, the public be catching on, A? They do the same thing every few years. I'd say that both these parties have got the US electorate pretty well trained.

Yea, and when we go belly up, we can have the government save us!

Thats already been done for the banking industry and wall street. I am still waiting for my bail out.

Republicans r not anarchists.

We need governments to enforce contracts and to run wars.





David

Yea, the recent bailout of banks and finance companies were "too big to fail," while main street continues to suffer. With the higher cost of food and fuel, more families are struggling - all with the help of our government to help the rich and famous.

cicerone imposter wrote:

Yea, the recent bailout of banks and finance companies were "too big to fail," while main street continues to suffer. With the higher cost of food and fuel, more families are struggling - all with the help of our government to help the rich and famous.

OBAMA is running the show.