Colin Hanna, leader of the group Let Freedom Ring, issued a message blasting “the establishment ‘consultariat’ in Washington D.C.” seeking to control the will of primary voters. Former Pat Buchanan campaign manager Terry Jeffrey declared at the website CNSNews.com: “Karl Rove is Not a Conservative.” By Friday, the activist group Tea Party Patriots had accused Rove’s groups of wasting $300 million on the last campaign and formed their own super PAC, the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund — “aimed at holding big spending politicians accountable for their actions.”
Every one of those activists and groups is a client of either CRC or Shirley & Banister. Virtually every shot they fired at Rove and Crossroads last week moved through the conduit of the PR firms’ email servers, landing on the BlackBerrys and iPhones of reporters across Washington.
The promotion strategy appears to have worked. A Nexis search for news stories last week turns up 57 results for the name of American Crossroads head Steven Law — the man who announced the creation of the Conservative Victory Project, and who commanded a nine-figure budget during the 2012 campaign. Bozell, best known as the caustic founder of the Media Research Center and a more modestly funded nonprofit dubbed ForAmerica, got 55 hits over the same period.
If there’s any tension between slamming the Washington “consultariat” and hiring some highly experienced Beltway PR advisers to magnify their message, it’s not necessarily obvious to those on the right who were leading the anti-Rove charge last week.
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