The Romney push-poll scandal continues to roil the right — and still nobody can figure out who, exactly, was behind the whole thing. Here’s a rundown of what’s happened so far this week:

Monday: NRO’s Matt Hemingway writes a piece examining the possibility that Romney’s campaign was indeed responsible for the calls. Hemingway finds that Western Wats, the company making the calls, has had ties (including, apparently, a common phone number) to Target Point, a consulting firm that Romney’s campaign employed to the tune of $720,000. He also expands on the story that Western Wats dialer Amanda Earnshaw had maxed out to Romney, reporting that three members of Earnshaw’s immediate family have also donated the maximum to Romney’s campaign. Hemingway interviews Republican operatives (including scumbag Roger Stone), who all find the notion of Romney push-polling himself perfectly plausible. Hemingway notes a number of possible mitigating factors: after all, Western Wats has a lot of employees who presumably donate to a variety of candidates, and a lot of campaigns have employed Target Point. Still, he says:

The Romney campaign, ultimately, has the power to clarify any misconceptions. If there is a relationship between the two firms, then [Target Point president] Alex Gage and Target Point should immediately clarify the extent and nature of the work that it has contracted out to Western Wats to end speculation and exonerate Romney.

The Romney campaign responds through NRO’s house Mitt sympathizer, Kathryn Lopez. A spokesperson denies that the Romney camp had anything to do with the calls. Meanwhile, Gage responds in a letter to NRO:

To set the record straight: TargetPoint Consulting has absolutely nothing to do with the calls in question. To be even clearer: TargetPoint Consulting has NEVER and will NEVER conduct a push-poll. TargetPoint is in the business of promoting Governor Romney, not manufacturing fantasy plots that involve smearing him.

NRO’s Jim Geraghty is unimpressed, even resorting to the C-word:

I still think that if anyone tried to hide behind a Clintonian parsing that they had denied involvement in the “push poll” but not the “message testing”, and that the calls in question were the latter and not the former… well, their names would be mud. [...]

Again, considering the damage the calls do to both the obvious target (Romney, for the Mormonism questions) and the possible secondary target (McCain, since the calls allegedly praised him), the obvious fact that would turn suspicious eyes to Giuliani (Western Wats worked with the Tarrance Group, which is working for Rudy), the damage done to whoever this trail leads back to, and the near-certainty that this would set off a firestorm in GOP circles, etc., the perpetrator is, I suspect, someone not familiar with how toxic push-polling is, or someone who doesn’t care.

And Hemingway notes that Gage never exactly answered his challenge:

I’ve read TargetPoint’s response numerous times and it doesn’t invalidate my story or address the specific nature of their relationship with the firm that allegedly made anti-Mormon calls against Romney. I’ll report more as I ask more questions.

Redstate says it doesn’t blame Romney himself, but pretty much takes for granted that Romney’s people were behind the thing — for which they are reprimanded:

And as for Alex Gage and the Romney associates who are apparently behind these efforts: in a campaign where the faith of your candidate has been respected by the overwhelming majority of voters and activists, you’ve managed to create out of thin air the kind of bigoted attack that cheapens the process and expects the worst of the American people. Nice strategy, folks. We hope you’re happy.

William Reston of Race42008 emphasizes this quote, wanting Republicans to be “clear of the stakes” in the dispute:

Which brings me to my question, if it is revealed that elements within the Romney Campaign are responsible for these calls, what happens to Gov. Romney’s campaign?

These calls were specifically designed to frame Sen. John McCain for the crime. That fact cannot be forgotten. Whoever wrote the questions phrased them in a specific manner that would incriminate the Arizona Senator. This is also telling of the fear that the author of the script must have regarding McCain’s chances in New Hampshire.

Reston observes that, if Romney’s campaign is indeed behind the calls, it traps the candidate in a classic bind: either he’s too incompetent to keep his staff from going off the reservation, or he was aware of the calls, in which case he’s in “Watergate territory.”

So here we are… It’s either complete absolution or utter destruction now for Mitt Romney’s candidacy.

Romney’s supporters have been pushing back against the accusations, but more questions are being raised, this time about two of the women who appear in news stories reporting on the original push poll. In those reports, the women are described as essentially ordinary citizens who happened to receive push-poll calls. But they are in fact connected to the Romney campaign.

Who are these women? Redstate reports that Marshan Roth, described in this article about the calls as someone who was “leaning toward backing Romney,” in fact gets paid $500 a month by the Romney campaign. And Rose Kramer, described in this piece as simply a “Romney supporter,” is paid $1,000 a month.

Interestingly, Erick emerges from these revelations with a new, self-professedly “off-the-wall” theory about the whole affair:

What if a campaign conducted a legitimate poll (push polls don’t last 20 minutes), asked about the Mormon issues in the polling, and Romney supporters who happened to get the call ran to the media screaming about them being push polls.

Kevin Madden of the Romney campaign confirms a part of this theory, telling Geraghty that it was he who, in fact, put Roth and Kramer in touch with the media, after they had contacted the campaign to report receiving the calls (Madden, apparently, did not properly disclose their relation to the campaign). That doesn’t prove that Romney is not connected to the original push poll, but it does at least lend Erick’s theory some plausibility.

What’s not in doubt is that Republicans have long used barely-concealed appeals to voter bigotry to seek political advantage. They’ve done it from the days of the Southern Strategy to the McCain “black child” rumors in South Carolina to the endless harping about immigrants this time around. The more socially unacceptable the bigotry, the more they try to disguise their use of it. Every GOP candidate and every GOP operative is aware that anti-Mormon bigotry is in play this cycle. They may not yet be clear on exactly how far they can push it. The current scandal suggests that they know not to get too close to it — but neither is it going away.

Posted by Paul Curtis
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 2:18 pm

2 Responses to ““Watergate Territory” for Mitt? Or Waterloo for Anti-Mormonism?”

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