Scott Walker’s recently resigned communications head has become the latest in a growing line of campaign staffers — some of them little-known — who are coming under a degree of media scrutiny that used to be reserved for candidates themselves.
Only a handful of Republican and no Democratic candidates have filed Federal Election Commission paperwork for 2016 presidential candidacies. Yet already, three potential candidates have gotten into trouble after online activity by their staffers showed up in negative news reports.
Liz Mair, a well-known Republican political consultant in Washington, D.C., resigned Tuesday, just a day after announcing that she had joined Wisconsin governor Walker’s presidential campaign-in-waiting as head of online communications. In very recent Twitter messages, the outspoken Mair criticized the state of Iowa for “embarrassing itself, and the GOP” and recommended that “we remove Iowa’s front-running status.”
Although these tweets were sent less than two months ago, they apparently didn’t raise any flags for Walker until they were reported by news outlets, prompting Republican Party leaders in the Hawkeye State to call on Walker to fire Mair.
In February, a strikingly similar story played out for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, another likely White House contender. A day after Buzzfeed reported on old, lurid tweets from Ethan Czahor, who had just been hired as chief technology officer for Bush’s political campaign committee, Czahor resigned.
A third case reported Tuesday, again by Buzzfeed, involved Dr. Ben Carson’s likely bid for president. An aide to the still-building campaign, Jim Doran, was found to have tweeted a series of offensive comments from an older anonymous account. Included in the tweets was one that said, “I’m looking forward to [Sen. Mitch] McConnell shoving his fist up [President] Obama’s a–. Although, he will, no doubt, like it.”
Doran is, however, apparently still volunteering with the Carson campaign-building effort.
“Right now there’s unfortunately a building sense that every staffer’s tweets and online footprint is interpreted by certain people as representing every single one of the candidate’s beliefs,” said Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican Party operative. “That is, of course, fallacious and stupid.”
That the controversial comments in all these cases were very easy to find raises questions about how diligently candidates are vetting their staffers even as it becomes harder to find people who have no record of making exploitable statements.
“It’s going to be near impossible [for campaigns] to find staffers and consultants without a digital footprint,” said Ellen Carmichael, a Republican political consultant who served as communications director for Herman Cain’s failed 2012 presidential campaign.
Carmichael said that current and potential campaign staffers are responsible for their comments online and that candidates have a responsibility to determine what is acceptable in past behavior on social media. But she said the news media’s focus on obscure staffers is disproportionate to many of their roles within a campaign.
“Digital media staffers and consultants are not making policy decisions,” Carmichael said. “In fact, they oversee a very narrow, but very critical, component of the campaign. They would not be in the room when formulating ideas on how to manage the Iranian crisis or how to reform the tax code.”
The Mair example — in which the online staffer was slammed for recent statements that were not facially offensive or in bad taste but merely candid — highlights another challenge. Campaigns need to hire communications staffers with prominent profiles and substantial online followings — both of which tend to result from frequent commentary and forthright views such as the ones that got Mair in trouble. As Twitter activity increases, the probability that somebody, somewhere will take offense at a tweet goes up too. A Washington Post columnist called the controversy “a shame — and a sign that social media is making things more boring rather than less so.”
Spencer Brown, a young political operative who has volunteered for several campaigns, said the online trail for anyone working on campaigns could provide endless material for the media. “I don’t think there’s a single political staffer out there who hasn’t tweeted something they regret,” he said.
Wilson, the Republican operative, said campaigns need to accept that many of their volunteers and aides will have a less-than-pristine track record on social media. But there’s a “bright line” in terms of what is appropriate.
“This is a paradox of modern social media,” he said. “We treasure and value authenticity and yet, when someone is authentic, they get punished politically for it. You’ve got to have a neutral spot somewhere between the campaign operative who’s never seen, or spoken of, or quoted on the record, and ‘Here’s a picture of my penis.'”
