According to the National Pulse emails from Hunter Biden’s hard drive – which Luntz infamously downplayed the severity of – reveal Luntz begging then-Vice President Joe Biden's son for access. On October 31st, 2012, Luntz emailed Hunter Biden the following:
Because your dad hasn’t said word one to me since the moment he was nominated for VP. Zero. Zip. Nothing. That’s why. Fair-weather friends get fair-weather treatment. And Beau [Biden] knows I feel this way. That’s not how I treat anyone in politics or in life. and by the way, I declared your dad the winner of his debate against Paul Ryan even though Ryan is an actual current client.
Hunter Biden responded roughly two hours later, noting he and his brother Beau “loved” him:
I love you… beau loves you— but how can you go on TV and not mention the Jeep ad— just in fairness- moving Jeep to China???? That’s not worth talking about as one of the most outright fabrications ever paid for on television? Again, think you are smarter than anyone in politics…but if you are doing a piece on ads in the last days— leaving that one out is just… [2]
Kevin McCarthy
House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy allegedly has close ties to Luntz and lives in one of Luntz's apartments.[3]
Frank Luntz may smugly believe that Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and other right wing talk radio hosts are "responsible for the stark polarization within the nation's political discourse" and therefore "problematic" for the Republican Party.
I submit the problem is that Luntz, and a misguided over-reliance on focus groups, has neutered and thus destroyed any semblance of courage in the GOP's message. Luntz is conflating, as many wonks and number crunchers do, cause and effect with regard to the bigger realities and polarization. The country is polarized because, well, we are polarized. Rush and "the great one" didn't make it so simply by speaking the truth. And pretending to believe the same absurdities the lo-info crowd believes won't make us any less polarized either. Logic dictates that as long as we run low information campaigns, we'll suffer at the hands of the low information voter.
Meanwhile, it is becoming obvious that Luntz has become a prisoner of his own results over the years, and as such, has become obsessed with what misinformation voters already believe. He seems to have lost interest in the value of persuading voters to believe the truth. To Luntz, and to Karl Rove, and in fact most to Republican consultants, a poll or a focus group is not the starting point for voter education, it is the end point for candidate capitulation. This explains the constant surrender in the arena of ideas by candidates and spokes persons who are ostensibly on "our side."
Rove admitted as much to the big money donors when he was forced to explain why the message -- from the Romney Campaign and from Rove's Crossroads organizations -- was so tepid. With Haley Barbour at his side, and with a straight face, he told the donors that he had "uncovered an acute understanding of the voters" as a result of focus groups. That entire notion, when you think about it, is preposterous. Instead of simply observing the entire country experiencing the devastation caused by Obama and other liberal policies for four years, Rove and his hired wizards pulled a few soccer moms into a lab for a couple hours to get their "acute understanding." What could go wrong with that?
"If you say he's a socialist, they'll go to defend him" said Rove, adding "if you call him a far out left winger, they'll say no, he's not." Which may be true, as far as it goes, but Rove's conclusions ignore the fact that it was just the kind of frightened messaging he and Luntz prefer that allowed people to believe that Obama is a nice guy, who is more or less a centrist, in the first place. Moreover, a two hour focus group is totally unable to measure is the impact of a bold campaign over time.
In other words, the consultant class is convinced that if Americans believe Bush and free enterprise caused the economy to crash, we must agree with them. If they think Palin is a dolt, beat them to the punch. If Obama is thought to be the mastermind of Seal Team Six' operation that got bin Laden, congratulate him and lavish him with praise. The focus group says so!
History, not to mention common sense, says otherwise. When Ronald Reagan ran for President, his messages were fearless, partisan and conservative, and while he met with severe push back initially, he stuck with the truth and won big over time. The same can be said of the 1994 mid term blitz orchestrated by Newt Gingrich, where the initially maligned "Contract With America" carried the day and blew away 54 Democrats in the House and 8 in the Senate. In 2010, the oft-ridiculed Tea Party was going to end the Republican Party's relevance, right up until they ended the Democrat's majority by winning 63 House seats, over 700 other state legislative seats, and a bunch of state houses.
Reagan would never escape a focus group. Neither would the Contract with America, and certainly not the Tea Party. Truth and conservatism are intellectual pursuits, and as such, cannot be explained or even properly contemplated within the confines of a single focus group or poll result. And yet Rove, the so-called "architect," cannot grasp this rather pedestrian understanding.
And apparently, neither can Luntz, and neither can the establishment consultant class. They would rather craft careful and non-confrontational campaigns that make the undecided voters get the warm and fuzzies in the focus group, than communicating the truth. Thus ,we get campaigns that are more geared towards not offending soccer moms in Southern Ohio than they are towards saving the American experiment in liberty and self governance.
Rush and Levin are not geared that way, and reality can sometimes be offensive and polarizing - yet it is still real. If the GOP doesn't figure this dynamic out, we're going to have a lot of un-offended soccer moms - living in a third world country. Wonder what Frank's cute little dials have to say about that?
C. Edmund Wright is the author of the newly released WTF? How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost...Again www.FireKarlRove.com, in which he further examines the focus group issue. His pithy twitter feed is @CEdmundWright and his Facebook page is CEdmundWrightAuthor
May 1, 2021
When it comes to GOP failings, Tucker Carlson names a name
Tucker Carlson opened Friday night’s show with rather unique information. The rhetorical question was why the Republican leadership is so disconnected from Republican voters. One of the reasons, he said, is Frank Luntz. For decades, Luntz has been giving the GOP leadership its talking points. The problem is that Luntz is not a conservative; he is a corporate servant and his points always align with corporate America – and lately, corporate America has been aligning with the woke left.
First, watch the video. Then, get back to me and we’ll talk:
So, you got all that, right? Frank Luntz is a man who has no loyalty, yet the Republican party leadership is incredibly loyal to him. He’s the one who tells them that Republican voters love illegal immigration, want amnesty, and think it’s a great idea for the government to take their weapons.
But did you notice how often Tucker said that he wasn’t attacking Luntz? Luntz is a great guy. Luntz is just doing what he does. (One of the things Luntz did in January was to spend an hour ignorantly attacking Trump from a leftist viewpoint as part of an interview he did for a PBS Frontline show called Trump’s American Carnage – all while being identified as a “conservative.”)
So, who should Tucker be attacking? He should be attacking the Republican leadership. Except he didn’t. He mentioned that Luntz is friends with Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, but he didn’t name a single other person.
Tucker said that the National Republican Congressional Committee, just this past week, invited Luntz to come to their policy summit and tell them what the voters want. What Tucker didn’t say is who was at the NRCC’s summit absorbing Luntz’s assurances that Republican voters, the same ones who gave Donald Trump a 92% approval rating, nevertheless want the opposite of everything that Trump stood for: strong borders, the end of illegal immigration, no amnesty, no DREAMers, no deals with China, no gun control, etc.
Even when Tucker later spoke to a very compelling young man, Pedro Gonzales, who spoke powerfully about the need for voters to rise up against GOP representatives who view them as useful idiots, not once did Gonzales or Tucker name which representatives are the ones parroting Luntz’s messages rather than listening to their base.
We can certainly guess at some of the ones who are completely enamored of the Luntz message. Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Anthony Gonzales, Peter Meijer, John Katko, Tom Rice, Fred Upton, David Valadao, and Dan Newhouse – all of them voted to impeach Trump. None of them listened to their base.
But other than that, who was in the room, lapping up the pearls of wisdom dropping from Luntz’s lips?
One of the main problems with so much of what goes on today in politics is that no one names names. We’re told that “Republicans did this” or the “Leadership did that” or that “Some are saying…”
In the same way, when we learn that the FBI raided Rudy Giuliani’s home and took everything but the Hunter Biden hard drives with kiddy porn, no news report ever tells who signed off on that warrant. Why not?
I’m not talking about doxing people by putting out their home addresses or naming their children. But shouldn’t we know which hitherto faceless civil servants thought it was appropriate to attack the former president’s attorney? And moreover, did so while completely ignoring that the current occupant of the White House has a son who committed a felony by lying on a gun application, who never registered as a foreign agent (the charge leveled against Giuliani), and who – let me say it again – reputedly has child porn on his computer?
It’s time that the bureaucrats who control our lives stop being nameless and faceless. And it’s time that the Republicans who think Frank Luntz speaks for the rest of us should stop being nameless too.
