Posted on 03/31/2016 2:09:18 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A super-PAC backing Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Thursday released a new television ad bashing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) less than one week before Wisconsins GOP presidential primary.
Great America PACs ad, first reported by CNN, accuses Cruz of expanding amnesty for illegal immigrants and softness toward dangerous Syrian refugees.
I want to protect my family, a woman said in the spot, appearing in a kitchen with two children. Paris, San Bernardino and now Brussels? she asked, citing recent terrorist attacks. "I want a president that will keep us safe. We need to control our borders and stop letting in dangerous people. Trump will do that.
And Ted Cruz? He wanted to let in more Syrian refugees and give more amnesty to illegal immigrants. That wont protect my family. Donald Trump will.
CNN on Thursday reported that the commercial will run both nationwide and across Wisconsin before its critical voting contest next week.
We have seen such a huge groundswell of Americans that want to help grow the movement around the Trump campaign that we felt compelled to lay the groundwork for the outside effort Republicans will need to win the White House and lengthen Mr. Trumps coattails to protect our majorities in Congress, said Jesse Benton, a spokesman for the group.
Cruz leads Trump by 3 percentage points before Wisconsins voting contest next Tuesday, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls.
Trump remains the GOP front-runner nationwide, owning a nearly 11-point lead over Cruz and Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio).
He has a lot of supporters doesn’t he? But he’s not enjoined by any of them to do their bidding as far as I can tell.
Are you saying Trump has agreed to get money from the Super PAC for specific promises ?
Shoe’s on the other foot this week, isn’t it? How’s that National Enquirer “scandal” going? Hahahahaha!
Ize so tpuid! I nneeds yoh apologys and evryhin caus ibe so sputid!
aint nevergots no edumatactshun sose its so gud too half frens lik u.
Trumps Campaign Manager, Corey Lewandowski told The Hill These guys are scam artists doing it for their own personal benefit and seeking to profiteer off Trumps name. People should not give to this or any other super-PAC claiming to support Donald Trump for president.
There is no such thing as a Cruz PAC. You know that.
We can’t help what stupid Trump supporters say any more than we can help what stupid Cruz supporters say. I believe the PAC you mention describes itself as an anti-Trump PAC, if I’m not mistaken. Trump was certainly justified in retaliating, but there’s no evidence that he did.
Trump has told all to shut down as soon as they started.
http://www.ktoo.org/2015/10/25/trump-squashes-make-america-great-superpac/
This one looks new and maybe he has not got to them yet. He shut the others down.
Well, that’s the implication with Cruz and his donors and related PACs, isn’t it? Sorry that keeping Trump to the same standard disturbs you.
Anyone can start a pac and support anyone they want.
Damm- now I am down with Cruz.
What a Clymer.
Exactly. He told all to shut down. They did. He will get to this one if true.
How did they get Heidi Cruz to do this ad?
So where is the proof Trump is the one who told the National Enquirer ZIP?
True.
Cruz’s ruthless campaign manager Jeff Roe once taunted a wheelchair-bound political rival on behalf of his candidate Sam Graves.
He left her this voice mail.
https://soundcloud.com/the-new-republic/jeff-roe-voicemail-to-sara-jo-shettles-2006
Jeff Roe also drags in children of rival candidates-
Candidates and children of candidatestheir Facebook and MySpace pages are the first thing we check, he told a reporter.
https://newrepublic.com/article/127717/ted-cruzs-howitzer
Here’s Roe pulling a Joe Biden (Cruzers are cool with it, no problem)
n August 4, 2006, a few days before the primary election between Rupp and Brazil, Roe posted an item rehashing what Brazil later called the most painful thing that ever happened in my life. Decades earlier as a teenager, hed been driving a dump truck in his high school parking lot as part of a class prank when he accidentally threw his best friend from the truck and drove over him, crushing him to death. Roe wrote that Brazil had had quite a few beers at the time of the accident (a police report filed afterward said the oppositethat Brazil hadnt been drinking) and concluded the post by writing, So now we have another instance of Brazils irresponsibility and not owning up to his mistakes. What else do we need to know Joe? (Brazil was not charged in the incident.)
Jeff Roe
TED CRUZS HOWITZER
Equal parts drill sergeant, data junkie, brawler, and entrepreneur, Jeff Roe will do anything to win. Just watch.
BY ANDY KROLL
JANUARY 20, 2016
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK PETERSON
Ted Cruz couldnt take it any longer. It was July 23, 2012. Houston. The final debate of the Republican runoff in Cruzs bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The former Texas solicitor general had entered the race as a footnote, his polling in the low single digits, his political résumé extremely thin. Ted who? But over the course of 18 months, the little-known corporate litigator had caught fire with the Tea Party faithful, snagging endorsements from Sarah Palin and FreedomWorks, upending every expectation about his chances except his own. Now he stood on the cusp of one of the great upsets in Texas political history.
The debate moderator played a video question from a voter: Why are they fighting so much? Cruz turned to his opponent, three-term Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, a soporific millionaire whod begun the race as the odds-on favorite but had underwhelmed and failed to avoid a runoff. As the summer had worn on and his numbers sagged, Dewhurst and his allies had tried to paint Cruz as a D.C. insider, a conservative phony, and a supporter of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Cruz had largely ignored Dewhursts salvos, though groups supporting his campaign had flung some insults about Dewhurst being a Republican in Name Only. But Cruz was particularly galled by his opponents latest hit. The week of the debate, a mailer had landed in mailboxes across the stateincluding that of Cruzs father, Rafaelhighlighting how Cruz, as an attorney, once defended a Chinese company accused of stealing blueprints from a U.S. manufacturer. The mailer branded Cruz a D.C. trial lawyer and accused him of lying about his work on the case. Ted Cruz: Killing American Jobs, Deceiving Texans, it read.
Cruz, full of indignation, pulled a copy of the mailer from his pocket. One of the worst things you can say in politics is to malign someones patriotism, he said, and yet what the lieutenant governor sent to my father was a mailer that said, quote, Ted Cruz worked against our country. The attack failed, of course. Cruz bested Dewhurst in the runoff, coasted through the general election, and headed to Washington to further torment the establishment and lay the groundwork for a presidential bid.
Almost two years after that debate, in the spring of 2014, the man who produced the un-American mailer arrived at a townhouse not far from the U.S. Capitol. Jeff Roe had spent the previous decade in Kansas City, building his own mini-political kingdom and earning a reputation as one of the sharpest and meanest operatives in the business. The 43-year-old had dreamed of running a presidential campaign ever since he got his start in politics in rural Missouri. Now, behind those townhouse doors, awaited a candidate set to interview Roe for the chance to land just such a job. This candidate also happened to be the same man whose career Roe had sought to end before it began: Senator Ted Cruz.
It was a Tuesday, and Cruz had votes in the Senate. Roe was told he had an hour to make his case. The two men ended up talking for three and a half. Even setting aside the whole Cruz-is-un-American thing, Roe wasnt an obvious choice to join Cruzs team. He had no personal connection to the candidate. Hed worked only on the periphery of a couple of presidential campaignsMike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Perry in 2012. Hed never even managed a winning statewide race.
Roe knew Cruz was his guy. He had studied practically everything Cruz had ever done and said. Both men believed that politicians too often waffled in the face of opposition, and failed to deliver on what they promised to their strongest supporters. It pisses me off, Roe told me recently. Politicians, he said, leave voters behind, they take them for granted. Because of that, less and less people participate in the system because their values continue to get trampled and they dont feel like there is an outlet for them to do anything about it.
Roe also pitched himself as singularly qualified to run Cruzs presidential bid, touting a pedigree few, if any other, operatives hadhow hed built his own full-scale political operation from scratch, with multimillion-dollar budgets, dozens of employees, running everything from TV to direct mail, fund-raising, polling, research, strategy. And he was ready to put the whole thing on pause and move to Houston for Cruzto go all in.
The canny strategy and smooth, on-message operation of the Cruz campaign have gotten plenty of attention. But the man behind it has not.
Cruz already knew what else hed be getting: A master of hardball politics whose attacks could get under even the toughest politicians skinhis own included. Maybe thats why Roes mailer never came up in the conversation. Even so, Roe left the interview uncertain: I walked out and I had no idea. Three days later, he got the call. He was hired for the Cruz team, and would later be named campaign manager.
Smash cut to the start of 2016. Cruz is soaring. He leads the Republican presidential field in Iowa heading into the opening contest, and appears poised for a dogfight to the end with Donald Trump for the nomination. Hes risen by running a vintage Jeff Roe campaign: obsessively disciplined, well-funded, laser-focused on the base. Cruz has played up his ideological purity and sought to coalesce Republican base voters behind his candidacy. Jeff has a simple philosophy, said Brad Lager, a former Missouri lawmaker and good friend of Roes. He believes that in order for someone to become president in this country, its not about motivating the middle. Its about motivating your base.
The Cruz campaigns success so far confirms what many people whove watched Roes ascent have been saying for years. Ive believed for some time that Jeff Roe is a Karl Rove-level political talent, said Gregg Keller, a former executive director of the American Conservative Union. Ive done four or five presidential campaigns. Ive run campaigns in virtually every state in the country. And I have not come across an operative of my generation who I believe is more talented than Jeff Roe.
The canny strategy and smooth, on-message operation of the Cruz campaign have gotten plenty of attention. But the man behind it has not. He prefers it that way. Out on the trail, Roe generally sticks close to the Cruz campaign bus rather than follow his candidate into small-town coffee shops and local libraries. When he does venture off the bus, though, you cant miss him. The guys big, all gut and jowls, resembling a political cartoonists idea of a fat cat, but dressed in jeans and an oversized Cruz 2016 fleece. He has a thin goatee, a gelled flick of hair, and thick hands often wrapped around an empty soda bottle for catching the spit juice from his beloved Red Man Golden Blend chewing tobacco.
What weve yet to see in this campaign is Roes other trademark attribute: the brass-knuckled approach to winning thats made him many enemies. From his earliest days running state and local campaigns, hes taken a scorched-earth approach to politics. Roe and his tactics have been blamed for damaging opponents lives and reputations, and even for contributing to a gubernatorial candidates suicide. (Roe doesnt exactly hide from this reputation: His web site features headlines describing him as ruthless and a leading practitioner of hard-ball politics.)
Ted Cruz, January 16, at the 2016 South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention in Myrtle Beach
On an early January swing through Iowa, Roe tended to linger at the crowds edge or at the back of whatever room he was in, studying the size of the crowd, monitoring his Blackberry. Thats where I found him during a Cruz stump speech in Spirit Lake, Iowa, standing near the untouched salad buffet at a Godfathers Pizza. For weeks, Id gotten nowhere emailing and calling Roe for an interview. He grimaced at hearing my request in person, but then spoke to me for a while, staying off the record. (We would subsequently talk twice more in person and twice by phone.) In recent months, Ive also interviewed more than 30 of Roes friends, past and present colleagues, and candidates whove tangled with him in the past.
The portrait that emerges is of a sleepless, methodical operativemachine-like, as a former client put itwho has made himself into the quintessential Svengali of our money-drenched, hyperpolarized era. You could form a support group with all the scarred and embittered candidates out there, Democrats and Republicans alike, whove ended up on the wrong side of Jeff Roe. Hes the best of the worst, said one Kansas City Republican who was beaten by a Roe client. The guys a scoundreland probably worse, said a Democrat who ended up on the wrong side of Roe. Be careful, said another Democrat when I told her I was writing about Roe. Hes dangerous. Call your mom. Tell her you love her.
Roes story begins in the muck. He grew up in sleepy northern Missouri, a few hours outside of Kansas City, raised by his parents and working on his grandparents nearby farm. Roe helped raise pigs, tend cattle, and harvest corn and soybean. His grandmother, a Goldwater Republican, took him to local GOP fund-raisers and candidates speeches when they stopped in town; she instilled in him a strong sense of individualism, the belief that government shouldnt do anything you can do for yourself. His grandfather, meanwhile, taught Roe the lessons he still lives by. For example: When its raining, put a bowl on your headin other words, when business is good, get as much of it as you can. At 17, Roe enlisted in the Army National Guard, joining the Thirteen Bravo cannon crew and training to operate howitzers at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Today he likens the experience to politicsan ideal howitzer crew would have ten guys, but they had to learn to fire with six, and a short-staffed political campaign has to adapt in the same way.
Roes Greatest Hits
Jeff Roe has carved out a reputation as the go-to consultant for tea partiers, die-hard conservatives, and candidates willing to hold their noses and win ugly. He and his team at Axiom Strategies are also known for theirshall we saycreative license. Heres a short highlight reel of Roes most impactful spots.
Ted Cruz: Killing American Jobs, Deceiving Texans,” 2012 U.S. Senate race, Texas. (Client: Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst)
Roes firm, working for Republican Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, took aim at his long-shot primary challenger, Ted Cruz, in this mailer that conveyed one of the nastiest charges leveled against Cruz in his short career. But it couldnt save Dewhurst.
San Francisco Values, 2008 U.S House race, Missouri’s 6th congressional district. (Client: Representative Sam Graves)
The attack ad that put Roe on the map was aimed at Kay Barnes, a strong Democratic challenger to Roe’s first boss, Congressman Sam Graves. The spot was slammed as homophobic and borderline racist. But it worked.
Corruptfellas, 2012 U.S. House race, Illinois’ 8th congressional district. (Client: Now or Never PAC)
This Goodfellas parody tied Democratic Representative Tammy Duckworth to both indicted former Governor Rod Blagojevich and Nancy Pelosi. It won a Pollie award from the American Association of Political Consultants, but Duckworth survived.
Pat Quinn Is
Tax Man, 2014 Illinois governor’s race. (Client: Illinois Republican Party)
Candidate Command, Roe’s direct-mail firm, produced this piece for the Illinois Republican Party attacking Democratic Governor Pat Quinn, who was ousted that year by Republican businessman Bruce Rauner (who was also a client of Roes.)
As a student at Northwest Missouri State in the early 90s, Roe battled with his liberal professorsone of whom, he told me, vowed that hell would freeze over before Republicans took back the Missouri legislature. He wrote a column for the campus newspaper called Where I Stand, addressing his thoughts on politics and current events to the silent majority. While his first column praised President Bill Clinton as an asset to the United States who did a fine job passing NAFTA, he went on to blast the president for Whitewater, health care reform, and his three-strike policy on criminal offenders (as too lenient). He joined Tau Kappa Epsilon because TKE was Ronald Reagans fraternity, and he earned a degree of notoriety as an upperclassman for trying to steal another fraternitys sign. (Roe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was put on probation.) During summers, he worked on a jackhammer crew for the Missouri Department of Transportation.
On a college trip to Jefferson City, the state capital, Roe met an up-and-coming state representative and conservative culture-warrior named Sam Graves from the states northwestern-most corner. The two country boys hit it off. Graves was running for state senate in a district he didnt know well. The district included Roes hometown of Brookfield, and the lawmaker asked if Roe would work for him. When the time came to decide between reenlisting in the Army National Guard or plunging headlong into politics, Roe chose politics. On June 6, 1994, he finished his stint in the Guard; the next day, he began his first paid political gig working on Gravess winning campaign.
Roe established himself as Gravess right-hand man, running his state senate office and getting him reelected four years later. In 2000, Graves made a late entrance into the race for an open U.S. House seat previously held by a conservative Democrat. Republican officials had initially blessed another candidate, a city council member named Teresa Loar, but they quickly changed course and threw everything behind the better-connected Graves. The campaignalong with the one Roe ran two years later against Democratic challenger Cathy Rinehartoffered an early glimpse of the soon-to-be notorious tactics used by Roe and his underlings. According to Loar and Rinehart, camera-wielding Graves staffers repeatedly ambushed their campaign offices and tracked them at nearly every parade, fair, and public event they attended. Roes young team dug through their opponents trash; Rinehart told me she resorted to dumping dirty kitty litter in her garbage to ward off Roes Dumpster divers. Loar recalls young men she knew to be Graves staffers posing as journalists or volunteers in order to get inside her campaign and catch her saying something incriminating. The little brown shirts, I called them, Loar said. (Roe confirmed some of this, but couldnt recall all the details.)
When Graves went to Washington, Roe was Gravess chief of staff and political consigliere. In Washington, you can always spot a member of Congress by their lapel pins; Roe, a former staffer said, was like a member without a pin. But he wasnt finished with Missouri. When Roe had gotten his start, Republican officeholders were a pretty rare breed in northwestern Missouri. But Roe and Graves successfully recruited and backed numerous Republican candidates for both local and state races. These efforts helped propel the red wave that saw Missouri Republicans take full control of state government in 2004 for the first time in more than 80 years. In the western half of Missouri for sure, Jeff was an integral part of that, said Lager, whom Roe recruited to run for state house.
In late 2005, Roe left D.C. to parlay his successes into his own firm, Axiom Strategies. He started off small, with one other employee and an intern on the second floor of what is now a bail bondsmens office in downtown Kansas City. At first, he offered only strategyhis adviceand outsourced the rest. But it was a propitious time to open a consulting firm: Republicans were ascendant in Missouri, and the states limits on campaign giving and spending would soon be toppled altogether, unleashing a torrent of money.
Roe hung war-themed art on the walls, stocked the fridge with Diet Mountain Dew, and, former staffers say, treated them at times like a family, at others like a platoon. He organized a weekly Bible study and insisted on all-hands, family-style lunches in the office. But Roe also dismissed employees for the day for arriving five minutes late, and he expected timely responses to emails whether they came at 7 a.m. or 10 p.m. If the office phone rang more than twice, it went to Roes line. On the second ring, youre jumping across desks to answer the phone so it doesnt ring a third time, one former Axiom staffer told me. The whole experience, said the ex-staffer, was like a fraternity hazing. Ten years from now, you can say to somebody else who went through it, Damn, that sucked. But we got through it.
One morning in the fall of 2006, Sara Jo Shettles, a Democratic nominee for Congress from just northeast of Kansas City, was out on a campaign trip with her adult son. From the other side of their motel room, Shettless son yelled for his mom to come look at what was on the TV. I looked up and there I was: the worst possible picture of me in the world with a big XXX over my head in bright letters, she recently recalled. The 63-year-old, wheelchair-bound Shettles, a longtime Democratic activist, was running against Sam Gravesand, by extension, Jeff Roe. Shettles had neither the money nor the name recognition to mount a real challenge to the three-term incumbent. But that didnt stop Roe.
Years before, Shettles had worked for General Media Inc., selling ads for the science magazine Omni and a few other trade mags. Roe seized on the fact that General Medias flagship title was none other than Penthouse. That was more than enough for him to cut the defining ad of the race. His triple-X attack ad accused Shettles of peddling smut and effectively made her out to be a pornographer. Shettles defended herself by saying she was hired by Omni, paid by Omni, and never sold ads directly for Penthouse. (She told me recently that she handled contracts that also included ads for Penthouse.) Roe wasnt buying it. She worked for scum, he told the Kansas City Star at the time.
Shettles had challenged Graves to a debate during the campaign. Not long after the triple-X ad aired, she returned to her campaign office to find a voice mail message from Roe:
[Roe hums a melody] Hi, this is Jeff Roe calling from PenthouseI mean, uh, Graves for Congress. Call me when you can. Im interested in your debate memo. I know youre waiting on a sponsor for a media host. So, gimme a call when you get a chance. 407-NAUGHTY-GIRLSI mean, 1222. Gimme a call when you can. Thanks. Bye.
I recently played back the audio of his naughty girls voice mail to Roe. Not my finest moment, was all he said. The way Shettles sees it, trashing her name and reputation was all a game to Roe. He felt that was absolutely 100 percent acceptable, she told me. And it was, in all reality, an overkill. Graves beat Shettles with 62 percent of the vote.
The more notorious Roe became, the more extreme his tactics. The same year as the Shettles race, Roe injected himself into a Republican primary 250 miles away in which he had no client. The suburban St. Louis race pitted an incumbent state senator named Scott Rupp, who Roe preferred, against a more moderate county councilman named Joe Brazil. Roe had started a blog called The Source (now defunct), where he posted political analysis, gossip, and dirt hed dug up on rival candidates, their staff, and their families. Candidates and children of candidatestheir Facebook and MySpace pages are the first thing we check, he told a reporter.
On August 4, 2006, a few days before the primary election between Rupp and Brazil, Roe posted an item rehashing what Brazil later called the most painful thing that ever happened in my life. Decades earlier as a teenager, hed been driving a dump truck in his high school parking lot as part of a class prank when he accidentally threw his best friend from the truck and drove over him, crushing him to death. Roe wrote that Brazil had had quite a few beers at the time of the accident (a police report filed afterward said the oppositethat Brazil hadnt been drinking) and concluded the post by writing, So now we have another instance of Brazils irresponsibility and not owning up to his mistakes. What else do we need to know Joe? (Brazil was not charged in the incident.)
The post was passed around like a dirty dishrag, as a local GOP official put it. Brazil ended up losing the primary, but he never got over Roes smear. In 2007, Brazil sued Roe for defamation for the drinking claim. A judge ultimately dismissed the suit, but not before Roe admitted in a deposition that hed never read the police report and had based his postwhich he took down after Brazil sued himon a reader-submitted entry in the Darwin Awards, a website that compiles stories about how people die in embarrassing and untimely ways.”
Roe likes his taxpayer money yes he does!
Jeff Roe
TED CRUZS HOWITZER
Equal parts drill sergeant, data junkie, brawler, and entrepreneur, Jeff Roe will do anything to win. Just watch.
BY ANDY KROLL
JANUARY 20, 2016
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK PETERSON
Ted Cruz couldnt take it any longer. It was July 23, 2012. Houston. The final debate of the Republican runoff in Cruzs bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The former Texas solicitor general had entered the race as a footnote, his polling in the low single digits, his political résumé extremely thin. Ted who? But over the course of 18 months, the little-known corporate litigator had caught fire with the Tea Party faithful, snagging endorsements from Sarah Palin and FreedomWorks, upending every expectation about his chances except his own. Now he stood on the cusp of one of the great upsets in Texas political history.
The debate moderator played a video question from a voter: Why are they fighting so much? Cruz turned to his opponent, three-term Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, a soporific millionaire whod begun the race as the odds-on favorite but had underwhelmed and failed to avoid a runoff. As the summer had worn on and his numbers sagged, Dewhurst and his allies had tried to paint Cruz as a D.C. insider, a conservative phony, and a supporter of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Cruz had largely ignored Dewhursts salvos, though groups supporting his campaign had flung some insults about Dewhurst being a Republican in Name Only. But Cruz was particularly galled by his opponents latest hit. The week of the debate, a mailer had landed in mailboxes across the stateincluding that of Cruzs father, Rafaelhighlighting how Cruz, as an attorney, once defended a Chinese company accused of stealing blueprints from a U.S. manufacturer. The mailer branded Cruz a D.C. trial lawyer and accused him of lying about his work on the case. Ted Cruz: Killing American Jobs, Deceiving Texans, it read.
Cruz, full of indignation, pulled a copy of the mailer from his pocket. One of the worst things you can say in politics is to malign someones patriotism, he said, and yet what the lieutenant governor sent to my father was a mailer that said, quote, Ted Cruz worked against our country. The attack failed, of course. Cruz bested Dewhurst in the runoff, coasted through the general election, and headed to Washington to further torment the establishment and lay the groundwork for a presidential bid.
Almost two years after that debate, in the spring of 2014, the man who produced the un-American mailer arrived at a townhouse not far from the U.S. Capitol. Jeff Roe had spent the previous decade in Kansas City, building his own mini-political kingdom and earning a reputation as one of the sharpest and meanest operatives in the business. The 43-year-old had dreamed of running a presidential campaign ever since he got his start in politics in rural Missouri. Now, behind those townhouse doors, awaited a candidate set to interview Roe for the chance to land just such a job. This candidate also happened to be the same man whose career Roe had sought to end before it began: Senator Ted Cruz.
It was a Tuesday, and Cruz had votes in the Senate. Roe was told he had an hour to make his case. The two men ended up talking for three and a half. Even setting aside the whole Cruz-is-un-American thing, Roe wasnt an obvious choice to join Cruzs team. He had no personal connection to the candidate. Hed worked only on the periphery of a couple of presidential campaignsMike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Perry in 2012. Hed never even managed a winning statewide race.
Roe knew Cruz was his guy. He had studied practically everything Cruz had ever done and said. Both men believed that politicians too often waffled in the face of opposition, and failed to deliver on what they promised to their strongest supporters. It pisses me off, Roe told me recently. Politicians, he said, leave voters behind, they take them for granted. Because of that, less and less people participate in the system because their values continue to get trampled and they dont feel like there is an outlet for them to do anything about it.
Roe also pitched himself as singularly qualified to run Cruzs presidential bid, touting a pedigree few, if any other, operatives hadhow hed built his own full-scale political operation from scratch, with multimillion-dollar budgets, dozens of employees, running everything from TV to direct mail, fund-raising, polling, research, strategy. And he was ready to put the whole thing on pause and move to Houston for Cruzto go all in.
The canny strategy and smooth, on-message operation of the Cruz campaign have gotten plenty of attention. But the man behind it has not.
Cruz already knew what else hed be getting: A master of hardball politics whose attacks could get under even the toughest politicians skinhis own included. Maybe thats why Roes mailer never came up in the conversation. Even so, Roe left the interview uncertain: I walked out and I had no idea. Three days later, he got the call. He was hired for the Cruz team, and would later be named campaign manager.
Smash cut to the start of 2016. Cruz is soaring. He leads the Republican presidential field in Iowa heading into the opening contest, and appears poised for a dogfight to the end with Donald Trump for the nomination. Hes risen by running a vintage Jeff Roe campaign: obsessively disciplined, well-funded, laser-focused on the base. Cruz has played up his ideological purity and sought to coalesce Republican base voters behind his candidacy. Jeff has a simple philosophy, said Brad Lager, a former Missouri lawmaker and good friend of Roes. He believes that in order for someone to become president in this country, its not about motivating the middle. Its about motivating your base.
The Cruz campaigns success so far confirms what many people whove watched Roes ascent have been saying for years. Ive believed for some time that Jeff Roe is a Karl Rove-level political talent, said Gregg Keller, a former executive director of the American Conservative Union. Ive done four or five presidential campaigns. Ive run campaigns in virtually every state in the country. And I have not come across an operative of my generation who I believe is more talented than Jeff Roe.
The canny strategy and smooth, on-message operation of the Cruz campaign have gotten plenty of attention. But the man behind it has not. He prefers it that way. Out on the trail, Roe generally sticks close to the Cruz campaign bus rather than follow his candidate into small-town coffee shops and local libraries. When he does venture off the bus, though, you cant miss him. The guys big, all gut and jowls, resembling a political cartoonists idea of a fat cat, but dressed in jeans and an oversized Cruz 2016 fleece. He has a thin goatee, a gelled flick of hair, and thick hands often wrapped around an empty soda bottle for catching the spit juice from his beloved Red Man Golden Blend chewing tobacco.
What weve yet to see in this campaign is Roes other trademark attribute: the brass-knuckled approach to winning thats made him many enemies. From his earliest days running state and local campaigns, hes taken a scorched-earth approach to politics. Roe and his tactics have been blamed for damaging opponents lives and reputations, and even for contributing to a gubernatorial candidates suicide. (Roe doesnt exactly hide from this reputation: His web site features headlines describing him as ruthless and a leading practitioner of hard-ball politics.)
Ted Cruz, January 16, at the 2016 South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention in Myrtle Beach
On an early January swing through Iowa, Roe tended to linger at the crowds edge or at the back of whatever room he was in, studying the size of the crowd, monitoring his Blackberry. Thats where I found him during a Cruz stump speech in Spirit Lake, Iowa, standing near the untouched salad buffet at a Godfathers Pizza. For weeks, Id gotten nowhere emailing and calling Roe for an interview. He grimaced at hearing my request in person, but then spoke to me for a while, staying off the record. (We would subsequently talk twice more in person and twice by phone.) In recent months, Ive also interviewed more than 30 of Roes friends, past and present colleagues, and candidates whove tangled with him in the past.
The portrait that emerges is of a sleepless, methodical operativemachine-like, as a former client put itwho has made himself into the quintessential Svengali of our money-drenched, hyperpolarized era. You could form a support group with all the scarred and embittered candidates out there, Democrats and Republicans alike, whove ended up on the wrong side of Jeff Roe. Hes the best of the worst, said one Kansas City Republican who was beaten by a Roe client. The guys a scoundreland probably worse, said a Democrat who ended up on the wrong side of Roe. Be careful, said another Democrat when I told her I was writing about Roe. Hes dangerous. Call your mom. Tell her you love her.
Roes story begins in the muck. He grew up in sleepy northern Missouri, a few hours outside of Kansas City, raised by his parents and working on his grandparents nearby farm. Roe helped raise pigs, tend cattle, and harvest corn and soybean. His grandmother, a Goldwater Republican, took him to local GOP fund-raisers and candidates speeches when they stopped in town; she instilled in him a strong sense of individualism, the belief that government shouldnt do anything you can do for yourself. His grandfather, meanwhile, taught Roe the lessons he still lives by. For example: When its raining, put a bowl on your headin other words, when business is good, get as much of it as you can. At 17, Roe enlisted in the Army National Guard, joining the Thirteen Bravo cannon crew and training to operate howitzers at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Today he likens the experience to politicsan ideal howitzer crew would have ten guys, but they had to learn to fire with six, and a short-staffed political campaign has to adapt in the same way.
Roes Greatest Hits
Jeff Roe has carved out a reputation as the go-to consultant for tea partiers, die-hard conservatives, and candidates willing to hold their noses and win ugly. He and his team at Axiom Strategies are also known for theirshall we saycreative license. Heres a short highlight reel of Roes most impactful spots.
Ted Cruz: Killing American Jobs, Deceiving Texans,” 2012 U.S. Senate race, Texas. (Client: Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst)
Roes firm, working for Republican Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, took aim at his long-shot primary challenger, Ted Cruz, in this mailer that conveyed one of the nastiest charges leveled against Cruz in his short career. But it couldnt save Dewhurst.
San Francisco Values, 2008 U.S House race, Missouri’s 6th congressional district. (Client: Representative Sam Graves)
The attack ad that put Roe on the map was aimed at Kay Barnes, a strong Democratic challenger to Roe’s first boss, Congressman Sam Graves. The spot was slammed as homophobic and borderline racist. But it worked.
Corruptfellas, 2012 U.S. House race, Illinois’ 8th congressional district. (Client: Now or Never PAC)
This Goodfellas parody tied Democratic Representative Tammy Duckworth to both indicted former Governor Rod Blagojevich and Nancy Pelosi. It won a Pollie award from the American Association of Political Consultants, but Duckworth survived.
Pat Quinn Is
Tax Man, 2014 Illinois governor’s race. (Client: Illinois Republican Party)
Candidate Command, Roe’s direct-mail firm, produced this piece for the Illinois Republican Party attacking Democratic Governor Pat Quinn, who was ousted that year by Republican businessman Bruce Rauner (who was also a client of Roes.)
As a student at Northwest Missouri State in the early 90s, Roe battled with his liberal professorsone of whom, he told me, vowed that hell would freeze over before Republicans took back the Missouri legislature. He wrote a column for the campus newspaper called Where I Stand, addressing his thoughts on politics and current events to the silent majority. While his first column praised President Bill Clinton as an asset to the United States who did a fine job passing NAFTA, he went on to blast the president for Whitewater, health care reform, and his three-strike policy on criminal offenders (as too lenient). He joined Tau Kappa Epsilon because TKE was Ronald Reagans fraternity, and he earned a degree of notoriety as an upperclassman for trying to steal another fraternitys sign. (Roe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was put on probation.) During summers, he worked on a jackhammer crew for the Missouri Department of Transportation.
On a college trip to Jefferson City, the state capital, Roe met an up-and-coming state representative and conservative culture-warrior named Sam Graves from the states northwestern-most corner. The two country boys hit it off. Graves was running for state senate in a district he didnt know well. The district included Roes hometown of Brookfield, and the lawmaker asked if Roe would work for him. When the time came to decide between reenlisting in the Army National Guard or plunging headlong into politics, Roe chose politics. On June 6, 1994, he finished his stint in the Guard; the next day, he began his first paid political gig working on Gravess winning campaign.
Roe established himself as Gravess right-hand man, running his state senate office and getting him reelected four years later. In 2000, Graves made a late entrance into the race for an open U.S. House seat previously held by a conservative Democrat. Republican officials had initially blessed another candidate, a city council member named Teresa Loar, but they quickly changed course and threw everything behind the better-connected Graves. The campaignalong with the one Roe ran two years later against Democratic challenger Cathy Rinehartoffered an early glimpse of the soon-to-be notorious tactics used by Roe and his underlings. According to Loar and Rinehart, camera-wielding Graves staffers repeatedly ambushed their campaign offices and tracked them at nearly every parade, fair, and public event they attended. Roes young team dug through their opponents trash; Rinehart told me she resorted to dumping dirty kitty litter in her garbage to ward off Roes Dumpster divers. Loar recalls young men she knew to be Graves staffers posing as journalists or volunteers in order to get inside her campaign and catch her saying something incriminating. The little brown shirts, I called them, Loar said. (Roe confirmed some of this, but couldnt recall all the details.)
When Graves went to Washington, Roe was Gravess chief of staff and political consigliere. In Washington, you can always spot a member of Congress by their lapel pins; Roe, a former staffer said, was like a member without a pin. But he wasnt finished with Missouri. When Roe had gotten his start, Republican officeholders were a pretty rare breed in northwestern Missouri. But Roe and Graves successfully recruited and backed numerous Republican candidates for both local and state races. These efforts helped propel the red wave that saw Missouri Republicans take full control of state government in 2004 for the first time in more than 80 years. In the western half of Missouri for sure, Jeff was an integral part of that, said Lager, whom Roe recruited to run for state house.
In late 2005, Roe left D.C. to parlay his successes into his own firm, Axiom Strategies. He started off small, with one other employee and an intern on the second floor of what is now a bail bondsmens office in downtown Kansas City. At first, he offered only strategyhis adviceand outsourced the rest. But it was a propitious time to open a consulting firm: Republicans were ascendant in Missouri, and the states limits on campaign giving and spending would soon be toppled altogether, unleashing a torrent of money.
Roe hung war-themed art on the walls, stocked the fridge with Diet Mountain Dew, and, former staffers say, treated them at times like a family, at others like a platoon. He organized a weekly Bible study and insisted on all-hands, family-style lunches in the office. But Roe also dismissed employees for the day for arriving five minutes late, and he expected timely responses to emails whether they came at 7 a.m. or 10 p.m. If the office phone rang more than twice, it went to Roes line. On the second ring, youre jumping across desks to answer the phone so it doesnt ring a third time, one former Axiom staffer told me. The whole experience, said the ex-staffer, was like a fraternity hazing. Ten years from now, you can say to somebody else who went through it, Damn, that sucked. But we got through it.
One morning in the fall of 2006, Sara Jo Shettles, a Democratic nominee for Congress from just northeast of Kansas City, was out on a campaign trip with her adult son. From the other side of their motel room, Shettless son yelled for his mom to come look at what was on the TV. I looked up and there I was: the worst possible picture of me in the world with a big XXX over my head in bright letters, she recently recalled. The 63-year-old, wheelchair-bound Shettles, a longtime Democratic activist, was running against Sam Gravesand, by extension, Jeff Roe. Shettles had neither the money nor the name recognition to mount a real challenge to the three-term incumbent. But that didnt stop Roe.
Years before, Shettles had worked for General Media Inc., selling ads for the science magazine Omni and a few other trade mags. Roe seized on the fact that General Medias flagship title was none other than Penthouse. That was more than enough for him to cut the defining ad of the race. His triple-X attack ad accused Shettles of peddling smut and effectively made her out to be a pornographer. Shettles defended herself by saying she was hired by Omni, paid by Omni, and never sold ads directly for Penthouse. (She told me recently that she handled contracts that also included ads for Penthouse.) Roe wasnt buying it. She worked for scum, he told the Kansas City Star at the time.
Shettles had challenged Graves to a debate during the campaign. Not long after the triple-X ad aired, she returned to her campaign office to find a voice mail message from Roe:
[Roe hums a melody] Hi, this is Jeff Roe calling from PenthouseI mean, uh, Graves for Congress. Call me when you can. Im interested in your debate memo. I know youre waiting on a sponsor for a media host. So, gimme a call when you get a chance. 407-NAUGHTY-GIRLSI mean, 1222. Gimme a call when you can. Thanks. Bye.
I recently played back the audio of his naughty girls voice mail to Roe. Not my finest moment, was all he said. The way Shettles sees it, trashing her name and reputation was all a game to Roe. He felt that was absolutely 100 percent acceptable, she told me. And it was, in all reality, an overkill. Graves beat Shettles with 62 percent of the vote.
The more notorious Roe became, the more extreme his tactics. The same year as the Shettles race, Roe injected himself into a Republican primary 250 miles away in which he had no client. The suburban St. Louis race pitted an incumbent state senator named Scott Rupp, who Roe preferred, against a more moderate county councilman named Joe Brazil. Roe had started a blog called The Source (now defunct), where he posted political analysis, gossip, and dirt hed dug up on rival candidates, their staff, and their families. Candidates and children of candidatestheir Facebook and MySpace pages are the first thing we check, he told a reporter.
On August 4, 2006, a few days before the primary election between Rupp and Brazil, Roe posted an item rehashing what Brazil later called the most painful thing that ever happened in my life. Decades earlier as a teenager, hed been driving a dump truck in his high school parking lot as part of a class prank when he accidentally threw his best friend from the truck and drove over him, crushing him to death. Roe wrote that Brazil had had quite a few beers at the time of the accident (a police report filed afterward said the oppositethat Brazil hadnt been drinking) and concluded the post by writing, So now we have another instance of Brazils irresponsibility and not owning up to his mistakes. What else do we need to know Joe? (Brazil was not charged in the incident.)
The post was passed around like a dirty dishrag, as a local GOP official put it. Brazil ended up losing the primary, but he never got over Roes smear. In 2007, Brazil sued Roe for defamation for the drinking claim. A judge ultimately dismissed the suit, but not before Roe admitted in a deposition that hed never read the police report and had based his postwhich he took down after Brazil sued himon a reader-submitted entry in the Darwin Awards, a website that compiles stories about how people die in embarrassing and untimely ways.
I asked Roe about all these incidents, along with many more rumors Id heard, over the course of our conversations. He said the Shettles Penthouse ad was accurate. He refused to comment on the Brazil episode. What came through most clearly was Roes lack of repentance. He sees no reason to apologizequite the contrary, in fact. When a Kansas City Star column appeared in 2007, criticizing his tactics under the headline, Voters Seem OK With Political Low, he had the story made into a plaque for his wall at the Axiom office. Politics aint beanbag, he likes to say.
Roes most memorably brutal ad appeared in the 2008 cycle, a race that had the potential to make or break his fledging consulting business. After years of hedging, Kay Barnes, the former mayor of Kansas City, had announced she was running for Gravess seat. Barnes, who had left the mayors office in good standing with voters, posed the most formidable challenge Graves had faced. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee listed Barnes as one of its top recruits, and Graves as a prime target, in what was predicted to be a Democratic wave year.
Roe felt his consulting future was on the line. If you lose that race, whats your narrative for going around the country telling people you know how to win a congressional race? he told me. It was a prove-it race without a doubt. He hit Barnes early and hard. The Democrat had attended a fund-raiser in San Francisco hosted by Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi, providing fuel for the spot Roe unleashed in the spring of 2008. Set against images of streetcars and a flamboyantly dressed black man dancing at a club with two women holding cocktails, the spot depicted Barnes as a far-out liberal with San Francisco style values who fund-raised with Pelosi and became a darling of West Coast liberals by promoting their values, not ours.
The attackwhich reads now as a rough draft for Cruzs recent New York values hit on Donald Trumpwas blasted as homophobic and borderline racist. (Roe declined to comment on the ad.) But as Roe well knew, Gravess districtwhich included only a small section of Kansas Citylargely covered socially conservative northern Missouri, where ripping into San Francisco values would be catnip for the conservative base. Barness campaign never recovered. (And she did not respond to requests for comment.) In what was supposed to be one of the most hotly contested House races in the country, Graves won with 60 percent of the vote. He has never faced another serious challenge since.
The view was incredible. The Kansas City skyline spread out before him, like a picture postcard. It was 2011, and Roe and his firm had recently moved into a new 3,300-square-foot headquarters on the citys northern outskirts in a ritzy office park named Briarcliff. Axiom boasted an impressive 81 percent win record in congressional races, and Roe was becoming one of the most sought-after consultants in the country. His firm was now working on dozens of races each cycle, with millions of dollars in revenue coming in the door. Roe had recently opened a satellite office in Washington, D.C., and would soon open another in Dallas. His clients were spread across the country, and his office had clocks set to Los Angeles, Denver, Kansas City, and Washington time. Roe hung a blowup version of the famous aerial shot of Muhammad Alis 1966 knockout of Cleveland Williams. He displayed newspaper headlines for all the big races hed won. On his desk, he kept a photo of his grandparents farm.
When a local columnist criticized his tactics under the headline, Voters Seem OK With Political Low, Roe had the story made into a plaque for his office wall.
Jeff Roe the Bad Boy had become Jeff Roe the Businessman. The timing couldnt have been better: Not only had Missouris Republican legislature all but deregulated the states political system, but in January 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court had handed down its Citizens United decision, paving the way for unlimited political spending by corporations and labor unions (and for the creation of super PACs). The radical overhaul of campaign finance was a huge gift to political consultants everywhere. It was time for Roe to put a bowl on his head, just as his grandfather had told him.
Roe grabbed those huge gobs of money with both hands, growing his little strategy shop into a consulting conglomerate operating in nearly every facet of twenty-first-century politics. He spun off his direct mail and polling operations into their own respective companies, Candidate Command and Remington Research, that pull in millions of dollars every election cycle. He started a spin-off firm solely devoted to franked mail, the glossy mailers and brochures sent out by members of Congress to their constituents, all paid for by taxpayer funds.
Oh and Roe’s worked for the ESTABLISHMENT!
Federal election records show the National Republican Congressional Committee, an establishment party organ and bête noire to the far right, paid Roes firm nearly $90,000 between 2009 and 2014 for strategy consulting, among other things, according to federal election records.
Roe has also worked FOR Democrats
“(Roe declined to comment on his work for Democrats.)”
Cruz must be so proud.
Where is your proof Trump is behind this?
“Very true...after all, that is the Trumpbot standard for Cruz...”
No. You’re confused. Let me enlighten you. I’ll be gentle.
The issue with Cruz is not the existence of PACs,,it’s the Donor List of Wall Street and establishment insiders who have donated to his campaign directly.
You do understand the difference, right?
‘Weirdness does not make you likable.’
Tell that to the only person in the history of presidential elections to speak publicly about copulating with rats.
So sorry! I didn’t intentionally post that long screed. Was only trying to highlight portions of it.
If the mods want to pull it, please do!
Sorry to all about that!
This Group Is Raising Money for Donald Trump. But Where Is It Going? | Mother Jones | Mar. 8, 2016
A newly formed political action committee is using Donald Trump's name and trademarked slogan--"Make America Great Again"--in an unusual fundraising ploy. The group, the Great America PAC, has no connection to the Trump campaign, but it has been blasting out emails soliciting donations that it claims will be channeled directly to Team Trump. ...A google search on Dan Backer is interesting - appears to make his living playing election politics, skimming from donations, etc. (like Rove).Dan Backer, the group's treasurer ... The fundraising email is signed by Amy Kremer, a former chairman of the Tea Party Express. ...
The Great America PAC was first registered with the Federal Election Commission on February 1.
Backer, an FEC critic who was the lawyer in a key Supreme Court case two years ago that removed caps on how much money donors can contribute to political campaigns and committees ...
Amy Kremer is also an opportunist hack (election entrepreneur), started "Tea Party Express," recently resigned.
I think the Tea Party Express, Kremer and backer are closer to grass-roots than GOPe, but they are well paid for their activism.
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