Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (22 page)

The timing was carefully chosen, and with the backdraft of Jones and Hoyt, sailing conditions were ideal. We launched the week Barack Obama was trying to reset the conversation on health care. This was one month after the violent town hall experiences in which a finger was bitten off in Thousand Oaks by a crazed Obama follower, where a black guy was called the N word and was beaten
up by two Service Employees International Union (SEIU) thugs. At this point Obama wanted to reframe the health-care debate, because his original effort had been a muddled failure. Obama was due to make his unprecedented speech to all schoolchildren on Tuesday, September 8; the next day he was set to address a joint session of Congress on health care, all in an attempt to create a fake groundswell where the following conversation would take place between America’s kids and their parents:

“Mommy, Mommy! The president spoke. He’s so wonderful! Please do whatever it takes to make his presidency a success!”

“Yes, darling. I
shall
support health-care reform, because the day after you heard the president in school, I heard him on television telling me that government-controlled health care is the most important thing in the world, even though every poll shows the American people want jobs and economic recovery rather than a new multi-trillion-dollar entitlement. Hey, isn’t that Joy Behar wonderful?”

I had learned from John McCain’s choosing Sarah Palin the day after Obama’s Invesco Speech—the speech with the Greek columns, the speech that was supposed to announce Obama’s godlike ascent to power, one of the “biggest” speeches of all time—that you could suck the air out of the room with a breaking, well-timed story. The day after Invesco, nobody was talking about Invesco—everybody was talking about Palin.

And I knew that for the Obama phenomenon to continue, media control was everything. Here was a construct whom the mainstream covered on a routine basis, whom they never vetted, who was in fact elected by them through platitudes and misdirection. That’s why it never crossed my mind whether I should play fair.

Fair loses.

So my goal was to allow Obama to speak on Wednesday night
before the joint session of Congress, then drop the first ACORN video early Thursday morning, so that instead of the American public spending the day at the watercooler asking each other, “Did you see the health-care speech? Don’t you feel healthier already?” they’d spend the day asking each other, “Holy shit—did you see that ACORN video?” We’d drop the first video Thursday, the second one Friday. I knew also that on Saturday, September 12, the 9/12 Project and the Tea Party movement were planning rallies all over the country, including a massive rally in Washington, DC. So we’d get an early litmus test—in places like Quincy, Illinois, and Washington, DC, we’d be able to see how ordinary Americans were reacting to the scandal.

There was still, however, the question of
which
videos to release. I wanted to launch the Baltimore and Washington tapes in close proximity to each other, so that ACORN and its allies would think these kids had done only a regional hit. It would never occur to them that this story had coast-to-coast implications, that these kids had done something far wider in scope. If I had released the videos from Baltimore and Los Angeles, I figured they would have known the extent of their problem. I also wanted to give them a chance to float the inevitable “a few bad apples” defense. So by making the story regional, I was sandbagging them.

But as we neared launch date, I was worried. We had the what and the when, but the big issue of
where
we should launch still loomed. As much as I wanted to exclusively use the web-based New Media, I wasn’t sure I could rely on the ACORN scandal trickling up from just Big Government, YouTube, and the viral Internet. I knew this ground-up strategy might not work, because the Complex had crafted a response to viral stories: Media Matters.

In an effort to act as a firewall to protect the left from ACORN-like stories, and in response to the success of groups like the Swift
Boat Vets, the mainstream media had created a rear-protecting unit, Media Matters. Its workers—“senior fellows” as they like to be called—are generally white, web-savvy young guys. Media Matters raises a lot of money, seven to ten million dollars per year, to nitpick a story to death, delegitimizing it, isolating it, and then claiming it has been debunked. The content at Media Matters is then repeated all over the left-wing media, from the networks to MSNBC and CNN to the
New York Times
, as received wisdom.

I knew Media Matters and its ilk could kill off a story before it got started by nitpicking it in its infancy. And let’s be honest here, I wasn’t dealing from strength; though I had the truth. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles weren’t professional filmmakers. I didn’t have a thirty-person staff of reporters or a personal staff or a PR team. So a viral, web-based rollout, however attractive, couldn’t be risked. I had to hit overwhelmingly, from all angles. I needed the tsunami. And I needed it to build to the point that it swamped the Media Matters breaching wall and washed right into the newsrooms. Then the mainstream media would have to deal with the fact that they were wet, and the water was rising.

I should mention that as clever or obvious as all this might sound, in retrospect there was no shortage of those who disagreed with me. I had in fact showed the videos to a couple of prominent old-school journalists, and they both told me that the Plan was a loser, that I needed to drop the videos neutron-bomb style—in one place, and all at once. They were also worried about the techniques James and Hannah had used. But talking to them actually strengthened my conviction—their objections sounded musty, outdated; and I realized that on this one I was going to ignore the advice of my elders and betters. I would stick to the “drip-drip-drip from everywhere” strategy I was so convinced would work.

It was time to get started.

I began by giving the Old Guard a fair shot—after all, they were still the prevailing power, and I couldn’t really gripe if they didn’t cover a story they hadn’t known about. So I approached a contact at ABC News and showed him the videos. He was blown away. But then he told me ABC News would never run it because it was “too political.”

I felt vindicated already.

Next, I approached one of my contacts at Fox News. I told him about the ACORN story, and simply handed him a copy of the tapes. I didn’t tell him what to do with it. I simply said, “This is what we’re going to do on Big Government, and we’re going to give you the full audio and video. You can do whatever you want with it. And you can ask James O’Keefe whatever you wish.”

Now, I didn’t just do this because I wanted the story to break on Fox News (even though I did). I did it because I believed that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t launch a story of this magnitude without having the massive legal authority of Fox check to see whether everything was legit. Handing it to Fox News gave me my highest level of confidence. I had a small business running out of a basement—they had a billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate. They were better equipped than I was to ensure that everything was on the straight and narrow. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I still had to worry that maybe I was being punked, and that this was all a giant scheme, that maybe James hadn’t told me the whole truth and that I was the target of an even grander plot. Giving the video to Fox News was like enlisting your tough older brother against a pack of schoolyard bullies.

Still, I went to sleep that night with an inkling that something might go wrong. My biggest fear was that Fox would have second thoughts and refuse to launch it, and we’d lose our tsunami. My second-biggest fear—which rose in paranoid moments late in the
night—was that Fox would refuse to run it because they had discovered it was a scam and that I was the rube who’d been taken.

At five o’clock in the morning, I got a phone call from my contact at Fox News. “There’s a problem,” he said. “It was supposed to launch at six with Megyn Kelly. It broke this morning on
Fox & Friends
.”

I couldn’t even pretend to be upset. Larry and I had been so stressed about launching this story, about having dotted all our
i
’s and crossed all our
t
’s, fearful all the time that something would go seriously wrong—and now I was being told Fox had run with it first thing that morning. It was the equivalent of your wife going into labor two days before the due date, and the doctor apologizing for handing you a perfect baby forty-eight hours early. Our response wasn’t angst—it was exultation.

The Fox News call prompted a massive scramble on our part to get all the material up at Big Government right away. Somehow, we did. Fox News was going with it, the print media was teed up, and Big Government was ready. All we could do now was wait.

ACORN itself gave us our first little victory. Scott Levenson, ACORN’s spokesman, responded to the regular airing of the Day One video on Fox by claiming that “the portrayal is false…. This film crew tried to pull this sham at other offices and failed.” Perfect. So far, everyone was playing their roles (and really, what other defense could Levenson have used?). It worked for us because we knew that Day Two’s release, the DC video, would prove that Levenson and the ACORN leadership were either lying or painfully misinformed.

There must have been some panicked strategy sessions and conference calls in the wake of the first video drop, but by the evening
of Day One, ACORN made its first attempt at damage control: they fired two of the lackeys in the Baltimore office. “They were two part-time employees,” said Baltimore ACORN Co-chairwoman Sonja Merchant-Jones. “One was a receptionist and the other was a part-time tax preparer.” To her credit, Merchant-Jones perceived our strategy: “It’s no coincidence that this video was released after the president’s speech.”
²

She may have understood our timing, but she—and ACORN itself—clearly thought that would end the story.

Not quite.

On Friday morning, we released the Washington, DC, video. It was just as damning as the Baltimore video. By now, the ACORN tapes were pinging around the Internet, and Fox had the story in steady rotation. We knew that we were drawing blood when ACORN abandoned white spokesperson Scott Levenson in favor of the dashiki-clad African-American Bertha Lewis. Clearly, political correctness, the race card, and Alinsky were going to be their playbook—a tried-and-true defense.

That day, Friday, I flew to Quincy, Illinois, for the 9/12 Tea Party. Right before we got on the airplane, I was informed that ACORN had fired two more employees in DC.

That wasn’t a small thing. It meant that we had gotten our
BAM! BAM!
It was a double blow, an affirmation from ACORN that what they were seeing on the video was not only absolutely wrong—it was trouble for them.

I still had the long flight cross-country. I was in the air for four and a half hours, without Internet access, on our way to our stopover in St. Louis. That’s my definition of hell, especially at a time when every minute counts (and the in-flight movie stars Ashton Kutcher).

Then I got off the plane. There were twenty-five to thirty people waiting for me at the terminal, all carrying signs about the ACORN scandal. This wasn’t my final stop—this was a
stopover
, and they were out there waiting for me to congratulate me. I didn’t even know how they’d found me, or what I was being congratulated for. Then somebody told me: the Census had de-linked from ACORN. Census Bureau director Robert Groves wrote a letter to ACORN in which he explained that “recent events concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with our partnership efforts.” Census Bureau spokesman Stephen Buckner told the press, “Their affiliation caused sufficient concern with the general public [that their continued participation would be] a distraction from our mission, and would maybe even be a discouragement” to Americans participating.
³

When we finally got to Quincy and the Tea Party itself, the crowd was raucous. At least a third of the signs were targeting ACORN. The story was exploding.

It was clear that this wasn’t just an A story, this was an A+ story—ACORN’s reaction had guaranteed us that. The political class was noticing the story, and the mainstream media could pretend not to notice, but the water was already up to their waists.

When I listened to my voice mail, there was one from Sean Hannity. “Andrew,” he said, “you need to come up to New York.”

I whispered to myself, “Wow. This thing just jumped another notch.”

For media types, despite all the talk of decentralizing the news business (including my own), the island of Manhattan remains the promised land. The major networks, Fox News, the other cable
news outlets, the major newsmagazines—all remain cloistered together in this leftie hothouse dedicated to one-upmanship. Baltimore and DC are big towns, but the world pays attention to what happens in Manhattan, and for the ACORN story to truly hit the stratosphere—to truly swamp Ye Olde Media—we would have to flood the Big Apple.

Bertha Lewis certainly helped. She responded to the Day Two drop by claiming that Hannah and James had been kicked out of ACORN’s Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York offices. “This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen,” she responded on Fox. This was, quite simply, a lie, and now, with videos from all those locations in hand, we knew we had them. It was time to take this road show to Broadway.

Lewis teed up the New York City video better than I could have imagined. With a pimp-and-prostitute photo in hand disproving her assertion that the New York ACORN office had resisted James’s pitch, I made a call to a top executive at the
New York Post
. By this point, the story was really gaining momentum, and I was feeling confident if I offered the print exclusive to the
Post,
they’d run the story the following Monday morning. They did it. And so for two days, Monday and Tuesday, Hannah and James were plastered on the front page in newsstands across New York City, the stories inarguably disproving every defense ACORN was mustering. Talk about assaulting the Old Media: the story was now simply unavoidable. The smile on my face, hunkered in my secret Manhattan hotel like some New Media seditionist, was from knowing that even in their townhouses and limousines, Pinch Sulzberger and Jonathan Klein and Katie Couric could ignore this no longer.