Fired McCain SC Staffers Complain Vehemently To U.S. News and World Report, Claiming They “Were Treated… As If We Had Leprosy”.
It’s time to add “leprosy” to “Bomb Iran”, “gates of hell”, “small-varmint gun”, “Guatemalans off his lawn”, and “flack”/”flak”, to the lexicon of memorable words and phrases from the coverage of McCain 2008. Hat tip to The Politico’s Jonathan Martin, who posted the U.S. News story and thus brought it to Campaignia’s attention.
The fallout from the South Carolina staff shake-up continues, although in this case it appears to have been related to the staff layoffs that took place, in the immediate aftermath of the relatively poor first quarter fundraising, at the end of March 2007. Two former SC aides fired after that report, just told U.S. News and World Report’s Dan Gilgoff that, among other things, “we were treated as if we had leprosy.” A considerable excerpt from the U.S. News story:
“Two former aides hired to spearhead religious outreach for presidential candidate John McCain say that they were virtually ignored by the campaign and that McCain’s top campaign strategists are intent on winning votes of religious voters without having to develop serious ties to faith communities. The aides, who were fired in early April after roughly three months on the job, said the campaign staff declined to return scores of their phone calls and E-mail messages, denied them access to leaders of the McCain campaign, and pressed them to collect church directories—a controversial tactic—as the centerpiece of a strategy to woo ‘values’ voters. ‘In the end, you came away with the strong sense that they had contempt for the faith-based community,’ says Marlene Elwell, one of those fired staffers. Elwell, a prominent Christian-right activist, was hired by McCain in December 2005 to be national director of his ‘Americans of Faith’ coalition. “The way we were being treated it was as if we had leprosy.”The McCain campaign said the aides’ dismissals were performance-related and were part of a broader staff reshuffling earlier this spring that grew from weaker-than-expected fundraising.‘We have the opposite of contempt—we have a great deal of affection for that [faith] community and a desire to help them understand that [McCain] is a good candidate for them,’ says Bob Heckman, senior consultant for the McCain campaign on conservative outreach.
But the other fired staffer, Judy Haynes—a former top Christian Coalition official hired to work under Elwell—had an assessment similar to Elwell’s, saying in a separate interview that the campaign exhibited ‘a contempt for Christians.’
‘It’s an attitude about the Christian community that they don’t like to have to do [outreach] but that they need to do it,’ Haynes said, referring to the McCain campaign’s religious outreach plan. ‘Like, if we can get what we want without having to get too close [to religious people] and not make a big display, we’ll do it.’
Here is the link to the full U.S. News and World Report story - “Politics: Fired McCain Campaign Aides Sound Off”.
Come visit the main site - www.campaignia.org - and the other new-media site, The Tower: Surveying the Political World From High Above, for more on Campaign 2008.