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Ken Mehlman's Voter Vault Ronald Kessler With the 2006 election season in full gear - and the 2008 presidential race simmering - the media have been painting Congressional incumbents as vulnerable. At first blush, this seems bad news for the GOP, which controls both the House and Senate. Indeed, a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll revealed that 55 percent of American voters plan to vote against incumbents this November the highest anti-incumbent number since 1994. Poll numbers like these, and others, have Republicans worried.
But Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman has faced such challenges before and is quietly assuring party insiders that superior organization and the Republicans' stealthy "voter vault" will carry the day.
Although widely admired within Republican Party circles for his effective, low-profile leadership, Mehlman's childhood did not exactly prepare him as a shoo-in candidate for his current position. The facts, however, reveal that he has been willing to challenge the status quo all his life. [Editor's Note: Get exclusive emails from NewsMax's Washington Wire with Ronald Kessler - and find out what's really happening at the Capitol, White House and more - Go Here Now.]
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A Jew, he grew up in Pikesville, Md., a liberal suburb of Baltimore. He attended a conservative synagogue called Chizuk Amuno Congregation. His grandfather, Joseph Mehlman, owned a tiny Baltimore grocery store and was a member of the NAACP. He eventually moved to Israel.
When Howard Dean, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, once famously portrayed the Republican Party as a party of Christians, Mehlman wisecracked, "That would be news to the people who went to my bar mitzvah."
Mehlman's father worked hard as a CPA. While Mehlman's mother, Judy, originally was a Democrat, his father, Arthur, was a Republican who supported Ronald Reagan. Mehlman remembers handing out literature for Reagan in the Baltimore suburbs at age 14.
"Reagan sounded optimistic about the future," Mehlman recently told me in his office on the fourth floor of RNC headquarters on Capitol Hill. "He was a guy with a bold vision. He gave me a focus on what I wanted to do professionally. I think it was the moral clarity with which he approached the Cold War, the optimism he had about America."
These days, Mehlman wields considerable power and has become an in-demand TV guest. Like James Carville, the Democratic attack dog now on the sidelines, he's a natural for the medium, although he seems not to crave the attention.
When it comes to his influence, his operational style, and his personal life, Mehlman is essentially the invisible man. A Nexis search reveals only a hundred or so articles that mention him. Most of the citations are news briefs that appeared when he was named chairman of the Republican National Committee in January 2005 and pledged to create a "durable Republican majority." Yet Mehlman was almost as important as Karl Rove in fashioning George Bush's victories in 2000 and 2004. Now, as chairman of the RNC, Mehlman is the man most directly in charge of pulling off a win in the 2006 and 2008 elections.
The question is, can he do it?
Ken Mehlman's path to the senior sanctums of the Republican Party was swift and impressive.
After Harvard Law School, Mehlman joined the Washington law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. He practiced for three-and-a-half years before quitting to become legislative director for U.S. Representative Lamar Smith, then chief of staff to Representative Kay Granger, both Texas Republicans. While Mehlman was crafting Granger's re-election to the House, he got to know Rove, then a political consultant and operator of a mass-mailing firm. A former aide to Bush's father, Rove had known George W. Bush or GWB as insiders call him, since 1973.
Mehlman rose to become Bush's regional political director for the Midwest and later his field director. He later was appointed a political director in the White House and eventually became manager of the 2004 presidential campaign.
Clearly, Mehlman loves politics.
At 39, he's single and single-mindedly focused on the mechanics and the craft of his party's work. ."He is devoted exclusively to his career," said Matt Schlapp, who was Mehlman's deputy when he was political director at the White House from 2001 to 2003. "He asks really impossible things Herculean efforts. He will meet you at the bar after work and calls to thank you. He knows everyone's name."
The liberal blogs have targeted Mehlman, putting out unsubstantiated rumors that he is gay. When asked by the Daily News about the rumors Mehlman responded with a chuckle, "I'm not gay. But those stories did a number on my dating life for six months." In fact, friends and colleagues say that Mehlman has dated several women.
Traditionally, RNC chairs have continued to practice law or to lobby. To avoid any conflict with his job at the RNC, he turned down several such offers believed to be for more than $1 million a year. As RNC chairman, his salary is $200,000 annually.
His job doesn't allow for much down time. Mehlman typically does not get home until 10 p.m. after attending two or three fund-raisers. He drives a BMW and likes to dine with friends at Rio Grande, a Mexican restaurant in northern Virginia, where he orders fajitas by the pound for the entire table. He enjoys a beer and occasionally has a martini or a margarita.
A few things not very well known about Mehlman: He works out in his Capitol Hill home or at a health club near the RNC office, runs on the Hill when his schedule permits, and likes to watch "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "Seinfeld" DVDs. On planes, he reads non-fiction, usually related to presidents or politics. Each year, he attends a Passover seder given by his parents or by his friend Ben Ginsberg, a former counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign. Mehlman has a younger brother, Bruce, who is also a lawyer. Bruce served at one point as assistant Commerce secretary under Bush.
"He is devoted to his two nephews and niece," Schlapp said. Like Rove, who calls him one of the smartest people he has ever met, Ken Mehlman has a computer-like ability to fire off demographic details and historic precedents.
"Ken is 24/7 politics," said Bradley A. Blakeman, a former assistant to the president and director of scheduling who also attends the seders. "With Ken and Karl, you could ask esoteric facts about the 1920 election, and they'll give you the numbers."
Both Mehlman and Rove are constantly at their BlackBerrys. Both are known for losing cell phones while trying to catch airplanes in the heat of a campaign.
"Mehlman has lost 40 cell phones," Schlapp said, exaggerating. "He loves being around people. He gives you money and forgets he gave it." Not to be outdone in that department, Rove had to borrow a pair of socks from Bush when attending a formal dinner given by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in November 2003. He had packed only a single sock of the appropriate color.
A March 8 Washington Post story reported that well-connected Democrats led by Clinton's former deputy chief of staff, Harold Ickes, were raising millions of dollars to start Data Warehouse, a private firm that would compile data on Americans to identify possible Democrat voters. Despite Howard Dean's much-touted use of the Internet to raise money, the story quoted former DNC Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe as saying the Republicans were much more sophisticated than the Democrats at using the Web in the 2004 election.
"They were smart," he said. "They came into our neighborhoods. They came into Democratic areas with very specific targeted messages to take voters away from us."
In fact, when Dean was boasting about the 600,000 email addresses he had amassed, the Republicans had 10 times that number. Writing in the National Journal, Michael Barone observed that few reporters at the time "took note of the number of e-mail addresses the Bush campaign had collected: 6 million." Today, the RNC has 15 million such addresses collected by enticing visitors to the GOP Web site by offering useful information like how to register to vote. A more recent feature allows the faithful to create their own Web sites.
In the seventh paragraph of its story about Ickes' efforts to create a data bank, the Post reported that the Democratic National Committee hadn't begun building a national voter file until the 2004 election. According to the story, the list of e-mail addresses proved highly effective in raising money. "Because of many technical problems, however, it was not useful to state and local organizations to get out the vote."
That disclosure provoked expressions of disbelief within the RNC. The highly sophisticated Republican data bank, "Voter Vault," not only is tailored to each county - so that it can be used to get out the vote and target likely Republican voters within Democratic precincts - it can be downloaded into a PDA, allowing precinct workers to add information picked up in door-to-door visits.
Mehlman's role in developing Voter Vault and just what it can do for Republicans this November and in 2008 will be spelled out in an upcoming issue of NewsMax Magazine. [Editors' Note: Get NewsMax Magazine with Ron Kessler's "Laura Bush" Go Here Now.]
"We had surmised that the DNC database was not useable by state and local parties," said Collister "Coddy" Johnson, who was national field director of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign. "But to see it written in plain ink was unreal. Think about the loss of economies of scale and efficiency that this causes, not to mention the inability to have a coherent national field strategy. It was amazing."
For the coming elections, Mehlman has infused Voter Vault with newer, more powerful technology, which should help with vote-getting strategies that are still under wraps. At the same time, under Bush's direction, he has changed the message of the party to be more positive and more inclusive.
"The party was struggling to find its message in 2000 and to leave behind the message that had made it the party of no,' the party of negativity," Mehlman told NewsMax. "Previously, it was the party that shut down the government, that wanted to shut down the Education Department and entitlement programs. Now there is a better articulation of the Republican agenda so Republicans are more likely to vote as a block."
Mehlman has reached out to blacks and Hispanics and positioned the party as the one for idealists. When he speaks to African-American and Latino audiences, Mehlman says, "I don't need the ownership society. I have a 401(k) and money in stocks. When I have kids, they are going to be able to go to school where I want them to go. But millions of Americans who live pay check to pay check don't have those choices." Mehlman points out that the things Republicans believe in more access to education, more access to retirement accounts are important to those living on the edge.
"The saying, If you're not liberal when you're 16, you don't have a heart, and if you're not conservative when you're 60, you don't have a head,' is no longer true," Mehlman said. "The reason that was true was the left was where idealism was. Reagan said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.' The left's response was, It's wrong to provoke Mr. Gorbachev who is keeping hundreds of millions of people locked behind a wall and won't let them practice their religion.' Who was the idealist? It's the right that says there ought to be personal retirement accounts for every American. It's the left that says, No, people who are poor can't be trusted, they are not smart.' Who are the idealists?"
Just as they counted Bush out in the 2004 election, the media each day run new stories on the dismal prospects for Republicans in 2006 and beyond.
"All conservatives are put in the same category by the mainstream media," Mehlman told me. "Either they are dunces like Reagan and Bush or lunatics like Newt Gingrich. We like to be underestimated."
Yet if fund-raising is any indication, the Republicans are doing just fine. The Republican National Committee has raised twice as much as Democrats since Howard Dean arrived as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2005. Republicans have $44 million in cash on hand - five times more than the Democrats. Moreover, long-term trends favor Republicans. Unions are out of favor, self-employment is on the rise, the exurbs are growing faster than the cities, and the number of Hispanics who increasingly vote for Republicans is also growing.
"What Mehlman is doing, both technologically and in terms of building the party, is revolutionary," said Brad Blakeman, a former assistant to the president and director of scheduling who also attends the Ginsberg seders. "But you'll never see that in the media because he is modest to a fault. He loves to be underestimated."
[Editor's Note: Get exclusive emails from NewsMax's Washington Wire with Ronald Kessler - and find out what's really happening at the Capitol, White House and more - Go Here Now.]
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