Dave Carney Refuses to Play Blame Game in Rick Perry Campaign Postmortem

Harsh criticism was leveled against Texas Gov. Rick Perry's senior campaign advisor Dave Carney by unnamed sources in Politico the Saturday before the Iowa Caucuses. The article didn't help the Iowa effort, and those "sources" interviewed revealed an astonishing amount of disloyalty to the candidate that hired them.

But when you're a political consultant, and you see that the polls aren't going your way, it's better for the life of your career that you are the first and loudest to place the blame on the other guy. This is especially true if you're inside the Washington D.C. beltway. That fall guy became Dave Carney.

Carney was hailed as a super-genius of political campaigns who, after leading the Perry fundraising to a record $17.4 million in donations in just 49 days, skillfully engineered Perry's airborne assault into the Iowa narrative, just when Iowa was attempting to create the state's own narrative that candidate Michele Bachmann won the Ames Straw Poll. The bump a straw poll victory would have been was not to be because of Carney's maneuver. Playing off the Perry image, Perry announced his candidacy in South Carolina just as the straw poll results were announced.

Sasha Issenberg scrambled to release his book that relied upon scientific studies of the 2006 Perry Gubernatorial campaign. It was released as an ebook on Amazon just as Perry plunged into the presidential campaign: Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America, A Sneak Preview from The Victory Lab (Amazon link in new window). "As general campaign consultant, Carney was suspicious of the various vendors selling their wares to political campaigns," Issenberg explained. "The television vendors told him to buy more TV ads, the printer told him to buy more direct mail. He wasn't sure any of it worked."

The Perry campaign of 2006 hired scientists to study the effects of various campaign techniques. Issenberg's full interview:

Issenberg explains that the results of the studies, as explained in his book, indicate that candidates get more favorable coverage in local media when the candidate visits personally than from the statewide or national press pool reports. Aggressive retail campaigning was the centerpiece of the Carney campaign, and it was copied by Allbaugh even after Carney was vanquished to Fort New Hampshire. There, like Confederate General Lloyd Tilghman at Fort Henry, Carney was abandoned and cut off, starved of resources and forced to surrender with only 1,500 pitiful votes on primary day in January.

Carney gave his postmortem of sorts to the New Hampshire Union-Leader. His summary: There wasn't enough time to prepare and raise the cash to compete, the early debates became a huge hurdle, and there wasn't enough candidate time to tend to the "vineyard" of support he could have grown in New Hampshire.

No where in his remarks were snarky criticisms of his peers or the candidate himself. He just tells it like it is, choosing to blame circumstances instead:

At first, Carney was Perry's chief presidential campaign strategist, but in the fall, when a new regime headed by former George W. Bush advisor Joe Allbaugh was brought in by Perry, Carney's role was severely diminished, even if he was not officially demoted.

...

He chalked up the failure of the Perry campaign to getting a late start in August, saying, “150 days is not enough time to be prepared and execute and run a campaign and raise money and do all the things that are necessary in the early state to be competitive. Just not enough time to lay the groundwork and build a foundation to run a campaign.

“We knew in the very beginning that this would be our biggest detriment,” Carney said. “All the ups and downs of the campaign were based on the fact that there just wasn't enough time.”

Carney said that “not having enough time to campaign in New Hampshire was one of the biggest drawbacks. Having 150 days divided up between the states, the debates, the fund-raising, the necessary work you have to do to lay the groundwork in the various states became very difficult to run a real campaign. In a state like New Hampshire, if you don't have the time, you can't compete.”

Carney did not want to talk about the big change in his role that led to him eventually parting ways with the campaign.

(Source: "Primary Status: NH Perry advisers Carney, Young speak out on failed campaign")

Apparently, the debate flubs prevented the Perry campaign from coalescing, and Carney's Egghead Campaign Strategy was never fully executed.

On a personal note, I am not sure how well such a strategy could have worked. The local media in Iowa, except for the Des Moines Register, was often crowded out by the national media. For proof, if you read the reports from along the campaign, you'll see that CBS News' Rebecca Kaplan and ABC News' Arlette Saenz are the most quoted and visible along the bus tour. That's hardly hyper-local media. But I think Kaplan and Saenz grew to like and respect Perry greatly as the story unfolded. They rarely reported many negatives, and often were seen defending, or shall I say, explaining a remark, or alleged 'gaffe' by or about Perry on Twitter.

What did seem to drive the narrative were YouTube videos, and social media "reports" from along the trail. Rick Perry's Cornerstone speech in New Hampshire where Perry was, let's say, a little bit different, and my explanation of it, is the most indexed and viewed content on this site. That video, and a companion video that was sinisterly edited to make Perry appear, well, drunk, received more eyeballs than any media report or outlet, local or national.

If I were a campaign consultant, I'd hire two people, with two Canon HD video cameras and a MacBook Pro with Final Cut Pro to follow the candidate at every stop along the route. Every night, video clips of the candidate's best moments should be posted on YouTube and distributed through Facebook. The Washington Post has an excellent investigative report about how voters are consuming the news during this GOP nomination season. Polarizing news, they call it. Watch the video:

This technique of generating user-generated video content, from an inside perspective of the campaign, arms the candidate's Facebook and Twitter followers and fans with engaging content to share in social media. The candidate with the best content, who is the most engaging and the most authentic, gets shared and viewed the most. I'd estimate that investing $6,000 per month into this kind of effort would have the same impact as a $1 million TV ad buy in Florida. And, what's more, with Google Analytics and Facebook's Open Graph, it doesn't require a Harvard scientist to measure its effectiveness.

Newt Gingrich is a content engine all to himself. Fundamentally, he'd be a very engaging and interesting subject to chronicle via social media in a very dramatic and humanly positive way. But I'm just a blogger. What do I know?

Back to Carney:

Having a senior adviser in the campaign not knowing what his role ultimately is is a huge problem. And having dueling strategists is not just a little drama causing minor friction between low level campaign staff, but a problem that the head of the campaign should have addressed immediately. That apparently didn't happen, and the person to blame for that is Rick Perry himself.

In today's Austin-American Statesman, six staffers spoke off-the-record about the dysfunctional campaign operation. One conclusion, according to The Statesman, "Some count it among the worst experiences of their careers."

That's not good.

The Carney interview in the New Hampshire Union-Leader gets the link. Picture credit Dave Carney by The Texas Tribune.