I don't know what happened in the Fitzpatrick campaign this morning allowing a decision to be made that sent the congressman's chief of staff, Mike Conallen, dialing into a press conference call featuring Patrick Murphy and Senator John Kerry with the apparent intention of derailing it.
As a grassroots activist, I have had a lot of experience with organizational meetings that start with "Let's stand on the sidewalk waving signs about our issue at POLITICIAN X's limo as it speeds into the event celebrating the opening of the Big Brother/Big Sister community center" and end with "Okay, so we all agree that hijacking the Big Brothers event would be a bad idea. How about we hold a press conference addressing our issue blah, blah, blah."
Writing as a grassroots activist who has worked with Congressman Fitzpatrick's staff, I have some experience working directly with Mike Conallen. Up until this minute, I always considered him to be intimidating. During meetings or at events, Conallen was the guy who stayed quiet or out of the picture entirely while Rep. Fitzpatrick's District Director jumped around in the foreground chattering about something meant to distract from the issue at hand and the congressman played the traditional role of the statesman/salesman.
Writing as a blogger, who just listened to the audiofiles of Conallen's appearance on the press call Patrick Murphy had with Sen. John Kerry this morning, I can say that we may be present at the implosion of a campaign if not an entire congressional staff.
Frankly, I'm not even sure where to begin. Conallen told the stunned reporters that he acted alone this morning. But at what point does a chief of staff wake up and say to himself, "You know what would be a great idea? Tipping our panicked hand to the national press sure to be assembled on this Murphy call with Sen. Kerry by calling in myself to ambush Murphy and confuse everyone else on the call in the process. Yeah, that's going to be awesome!" At what point does the chief of staff for a congressman who has no plan about what to do in Iraq beyond needing a "new strategy for success" figure that he should be calling into a press conference call devoted to Iraq policy and featuring not only an Iraq war vet with an exit strategy but also a sitting member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who also happens to have an exit strategy for Iraq. I mean, there's out of your league and then there's out of your mind.
But thank the bloggy gods, reason did not prevail wherever this decision was made and so we are treated to an absolute trainwreck of the sort of proportions that political bloggers only dream about.
I have the audio files but it will take me hours to figure out how to post them here. I'm going to have to go with a transcript instead. Find some nice circus music - or the soundtrack to Platoon - to listen to as you read:
Conallen: This is Mike Conallen with the Fitzpatrick campaign? I have a question for Patrick Murphy. Pat, the congressman has invited you to a series of specific policy discussions including the War in Iraq. Why, why, won't you, uh, agree, uh, to meet and discuss your five ...
Sen. Kerry: Is this a member of the press asking a question?
Conallen: different positions on the war in Iraq?
Murphy: Mike, this is, uh, typical, because just yesterday I hand delivered a letter saying that we already agreed to five debates and we've already said that we're going to do two more joint appearances before an editorial board, and this is exactly what's wrong with politics. Because you want to stretch the truth. And I will stand there and I have agreed to at least three now and possibly even more ...
Conallen: Why not agree to them right now? Agree to them now. We'll set them up and we'll talk specifically about Iraq and we'll talk about your five different positions on the war.
Murphy: Mike, again: hand delivered letter, certified, saying that we've agreed to these debates. I will agree to debate the congressman and we'll ...
Conallen: Will you agree to a specific debate, um, this month on your position, your five different positions on the war?
(laughter)
Murphy: Mike, I've already agreed to one. Yes I will and I look forward to doing it. I think it's important to go back to what we just talked about earlier, uh, I just the other day, I got a [unintelligible] I got an email from one of my students, one of my cadets I taught at West Point, he's now a captain over in Iraq and he said to me, he said, "Sir, you're absolutely right." He's like, I'm over here and he offered, he said I can use his name but I don't want to do that because I don't want to jeopardize him, put him in the middle of a political debate here but he said to me, "You're absolutely right. The Iraqis over here think we're going to be here forever and until we turn over the battle stations and until we articulate a timeline saying when we're going to do it, they think, they're just going to stand on the sidelines and wait until we go home."
So we need leaders who are going to stand up, who will say, "This is a timeline. This is how we're going to win the War on Terror. This is how to refocus our mission on how to win this war on terror and that's why I [unintelligible] an opportunity to do so."
Sen. Kerry: Obviously Patrick doesn't need any defense for himself but I find it kind of fascinating that members of the campaign staff get on a press conference call and ask questions. That's sort of a new tactic.
And it gets better or worse, if you're Conallen. I don't know the specifics but it seems as if Conallen stayed on the line with some of the media after Murphy and Kerry left. The de facto moderator was Stuart O'Neill, who has a voice perfect for work at a mellow jazz station. He never raised his voice or sounded sarcastic. I don't know the women's names and I couldn't always tell them apart. I labeled them as best I could but I may have erred:
O'Neill: This particular site offers long form interviews to candidates so they can be widely known and get a chance to have an unedited interview. Um, so I really do try to take a view of candidates that allows them to be more transparent. Do you think it's appropriate to try to hijack a conference call that was specifically for press, that was specifically for the endorsement of one person by another - do you think it's appropriate to hijack that conference for your own partisan political use?
Conallen: Um, I think it was appropriate to try to get Patrick Murphy ...
O'Neill: No. You didn't answer the question, sir.
Conallen: I'm answering your question. I do think it's appropriate to ask Patrick Murphy a question about whether ...
O'Neill: Do you think, sir, that it was appropriate to hijack ...
Conallen. Yes.
O'Neill: ... a specifically scheduled conference, that was closed to anyone but the press and use that for your own partisan political purpose?
Conallen: Sir. Can I answer the question?
O'Neill: Of course you can, if you answer it in an actual answer, other than repeating your own political agenda.
Conallen: Well, I don't know what that means.
O'Neill: That means yes or no, sir.
Conallen: The answer to my question was yes, I thought it was appropriate because, uh, Patrick Murphy, uh, has, failed to publically agree, uh, to discuss the issues most important to the Eighth Congressional District.
Woman 1: How about if you invite us all on, all on to your next press conference?
O'Neill: Well, let's not worry about that. Let's not worry about that.
Conallen: You're more than welcome to participate in any press conference we have.
Ah, but who would be so stupid as to actually do that and show such contempt for the press and the process? Did you ever see that episode of Cheers when Diane, who at this point is working in a grocery store, poses as a reporter at a press conference so she can ambush Sam's new girlfriend, who is a city councilwoman, with a personal question about their relationship? When the councilwoman's staff member asks her what paper she's from, she's forced to say something like Peterson Markets' Penny Shopper and Coupon Guide. That's the scene that ran through my head during this part of the call. Only Conallen can't think as quickly as Diane. The call continued:
O'Neill: I understand that, sir. Thank you for that. What I perceive from this conference is that Mr. Murphy has already agreed to five conversations, has said send him a hand-written letter, he'll agree to more.
Conallen: We've done that.
O'Neill: You keep harping as if he will not. You have hinted, you have intimated that this veteran of the service, you have intimated many things in front of major press and in order to get your message out to major press, which you may not be able to do in any other way ... And I think that, sir, as someone who's been participating in the political process since 1966, up and down from the top to the bottom, I think that is, sir, not an appropriate tactic. And I'm mentioning that as someone who has been there and actually is involved in several campaigns now beyond my press operation.
Conallen: Well, I certainly appreciate your view and experience and, um you know, thanks for offering it.
Woman 2: Who do you work for?
Conallen: Uh, Fitzpatrick for Congress.
Woman 2: No, the man who was asking you the question.
O'Neill: I have a site called Political Interviews.com.
Woman 2: And what's your name?
O'Neill: Stuart O'Neill.
Man: Mr. Conallen, how exactly did you get this number?
Conallen: Ummmm .. how did I get the number? Uh, we, we, were calling press trying to get press to come to uh, um, another event of ours and they told us that they were participating in this conference call.
Woman 2: So a reporter gave you this number?
Conallen: Yeah.
O'Neill: And invited you to the call? Or did you just take that ...
Woman 2: From what? From where?
Conallen: I'm not going to say which particular reporter or outlet. We got it from several places actually. We were doing a press conference on some funding for Big Brothers/Big Sisters uh, today and we were trying to generate some press coverage of that conference and most of the local papers told us that they weren't able to come because they were covering this conference call.
(long pause)
O'Neill: So are we finished?
Oh no, Mr. O'Neill. We are most definitely not finished. For some reason known only to Mike Conallen, this goes on for six more minutes. Apparently the rope wasn't long enough yet.
Woman 1: What is your official role with the campaign?
Conallen: Uh, I am an advisor. I don't have an official title.
Woman 1: Didn't you just say that you're Chief of Staff?
Conallen: I do. I serve as his Chief of Staff.
Woman 1: Okay, so you just flip-flopped there because you said you didn't have an official title but before you were the Chief of Staff.
Conallen: With the Campaign, I don't have an official title. No, ma'am.
Woman 1: Oh, but you did say, because I wrote it down, that I am Fitz's Chi o S.
Conallen: Yeah, that's on the official side, the congressional office.
Woman 1: Okay, so you are in his congressional office as his cos but you don't work for the PAC.
Conallen: The PAC?
O'Neill: Or his, his campaign committee
Woman 1: His campaign committee.
Conallen: I'm not paid by his campaign, no.
Woman 1: No, but you're chief of staff in his congressional office.
I'm going to interrupt here to defend this woman's confusion a little bit. The line between what's paid for by the campaign and what's paid for by the office - in other words, by you and me - is blurry enough to lose all meaning. I've received five Fitzpatrick direct mailings in the last few weeks. Three I paid for, two the campaign paid for. The only difference between the two sets is that the two pieces paid for by the campaign are obvious hit pieces attempting to position Murphy on the side of internet sex offenders and communists. The three we paid for are what people would doubtless consider good, wholesome, positive campaign lit. If I told them that no, they were put out by the Congressional Office, whereas the attack ads were put out by the Campaign, they'd tell me I had a distinction there without a difference and they'd be right. And, since what Conallen did during the call was an attack, anyone would be right to assume that he was a campaign operative. The call continues:
Woman 2: So have you been doing this phone call on congressional time?
Conallen: Nope! This is my own personal time.
O'Neill: Oh, you took the day off.
Woman 2: So, you took the day off?
Conallen: Yep! I'm actually in my house right now.
Which means nothing. I work from home. I'm in my house twenty-three hours a day.
O'Neill: So you took the day off to have a campaign event for the candidate and made sure that you were at your house promoting that same thing - or the campa office - promoting that same event while you were still on the federal payroll - even though you took the day off - while you were still on the federal payroll and simply exempted yourself from pay this particular day by taking a personal day. Do I get that correctly?
Conallen: I don't know what that means.
Woman 1: Oh, please.
Woman 2: I think he wants to know, did you take a personal day? A sick day? What did you take? A vacation day?
Conallen: This is a vacation day.
Woman 2: So you're getting paid for your vacation day.
Conallen: Yeah, most people do.
Me again. Here's some reality for Mr. Conallen from Planet Working Class America: In fact, 25.5 million private-sector workers in the United States do not have paid holidays and 22.2 million private-sector workers have no paid vacation, according to a survey of benefits by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. We now return you to Fantasyland, sponsored by the GOP:
Woman 1: Yeah, yeah, you're getting paid for your vacation day and you're on congressional staff and you're not supposed to be campaigning.
Conallen: We're allowed to campaign on our own personal time.
Oh, jeebus. I almost feel sorry for him.
Woman: Not when you're getting paid for a vacation day.
Conallen: (stammering about being able to do what he's doing)
Stuart O'Neill: Well, let's not, you know. I think probably there's an issue there that could check with the ethics office with because I think there's a possibility that collecting federal vacation day money and campaigning at the same time could be an issue but I'm no expert. Uh, but it's interesting to me - I just can't get over the fact that you would call into a private press call as a non-press person and use it to confront a candidate. It's a tactic I have not seen on teleconferences previously.
That one so surprises me and now we're on to a whole new teleconference uh, with the original participants gone, um, and the original organizers gone. This is a very surprising turn of events for me, sir. I just don't get it. I don't get why you would do that when it would be easy enough to call up your local papers and send out a press conference and send out a well-constructed uh, uh, news release or news advisory there and then hold your own press conference on the same issue and get lots of local coverage. Do you perceive that you're gonna get lots of local coverage off this with one paper that spoke up?
Conallen: No, I, wuh, our goal here was to try to get the candidate Patrick Murphy to agree to a series of policy discussions so that we can inform the voters of both candidate's positions on the issues.
Can you smell the blood in the water? If you can't read that answer again.
O'Neill: Seems to me that you did.
Conallen: Yeah, I know, that, so, you know, that was a, that was a, that was a good turn of events.
O'Neill: Seems to me, according to him, he had done that previously.
Conallen: Well, as I said, what he mentioned was previously agreed to trad uh, um, camp debates
O'Neill: Which is where you bring up, sir, which is where you bring up specific campaign issues and you make sure the campaign format, which I'm sure both sides would agree to, which is lengthy enough so that people can talk. You only have two candidates in the race, you don't have forty-five.
Conallen: Right. Well, we thought that these issues were important enough to have further discussion. So. Alright! ...
"Alright!" the telephoner's universal cry for help when the conversation has gone on long enough - or in Conallen's case way, way, way too long. And it's about to go longer.
Woman 2: Is Congressman Fitzpatrick aware of you calling in?
Conallen: Uhhh, I don't know if he is or not. I never talked to him about it.
Woman 2: So you just, as his CoS, you just came up with this on your own?
Conallen: Yeah.
Woman 3: Did you request permission from the campaign manager?
Conallen: Uh, no.
Woman 2: Is anybody on the staffing of the campaign aware of you being on this call?Conallen: Uh, no.
O'Neill: And yet you've got national press listening to you?
That wouldn't have been my question. I would have asked to whom he was referring when he said "... our goal here was to try to get the candidate Patrick Murphy to agree to a series of policy discussions..."
Conallen: Um.
Woman 2: But nobody at the campaign knows what you're doing?
Conallen: Uh, I didn't talk, I don't think I talked to anybody on the campaign.
There's the Mike I know! "I don't think I talked to anyone on the campaign." Now he's talking like one of those trial attorneys Fitzpatrick hates so much.
Man: Is there any way to know that you're actually at your house and not calling from [unintelligible]
Conallen: (laughs) Well, I mean ..
O'Neill: I'm sorry, we couldn't hear that.
Woman 2: Is there any way to know that you're calling from your house instead [unintelligible] from your congressional office or a federally paid for resource?
Conallen: What do you want me to give you my address and send someone over here to see that I'm in my house?
Woman 2: No, I believe the question out there was is there any way to know that, to verify that, could you offer any means of verification?
O'Neill: Perhaps to one of the major media outlets who could share it with other people and you could do that in email or something.
Woman 4: Is anybody still on from Murphy's office?
Conallen: How would I do that? I don't think so.
So why in the name of heaven is he still on? The master plan that he alone devised and yet had a shared goal has officially fallen apart.
Conallen: How would want me to do that?
O'Neill: Well, get a statement from your candidate.
Woman 2: Well, I think it's up to you.
Conallen: A statement from me that I'm in my house?
O'Neill: No a statement from your candidate that this was an authorized activity and that you were, in fact, operating on non-federal time.
The Dems have released a statement:
FITZPATRICK SENDS CHIEF OF STAFF TO DISRUPT PATRICK MURPHY CONFERENCE CALL
HARRISBURG: Today, Pennsylvania Democrats called on Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) to explain the inappropriate actions of his taxpayer-paid Chief of Staff, Mike Conallen.
On a conference call with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Patrick Murphy this morning that focused on the issues of terrorism and Iraq, Conallen dialed in to the conference call and confronted Murphy.
“Mike Fitzpatrick clearly doesn’t think terrorism and the security of Pennsylvania families are issues that deserve respect,” said Don Morabito, Executive Director of the PA Democratic Party. “While, Patrick Murphy and John Kerry – two veterans - were having a serious conversation about terrorism and the war in Iraq with media, Fitzpatrick sent his Chief of Staff to disrupt the call and play a partisan political game.
“Pennsylvania families deserve better than Fitzpatrick’s dirty political games and he owes an apology to the people of his district.”
The Pennsylvania Democratic Party asked Fitzpatrick to answer the following questions:
1. Did you approve of and do you condone the campaign disruption by your taxpayer-paid Chief of Staff during official working hours?
2. Will you and your Chief of Staff apologize to the people of Pennsylvania for making the issues of terrorism and the war in Iraq into a political game?3. Will you pay back the cost of the long distance phone call and the taxpayer time spent by Mike Conallen? If not, will you ask him to?
“This is exactly the kind of pure partisan nonsense that voters are tired of,” Morabito said. “Unfortunately, it’s all too consistent with Republican tactics that are too common today.”
Good questions. Congressman Fitzpatrick has open office hours tomorrow. I'll be there on business unrelated to this disaster. PA Action is going to try for the third time in two weeks to get the congressman to clarify his position on Medicare Part D, something he just refuses to do. We sent out press advisories about our impending visit but I despaired of getting any press to show up until now. Now I'm thinking that we have a chance of seeing one or two hanging around in the hopes that Mike Conallen's vacation is over.
UPDATE: More coverage of the call can be found at The Democratic Daily: Here and Here BigDog04's dKos diary
both writers were present on the call.
The audio files were first posted on my server and I am "Woman 1".
Credit to The Democratic Daily who broke this story on the blogosphere is much more polite that thanking the "bloggy gods."
http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=3852
Posted by: Pamela Leavey | August 12, 2006 at 01:06 PM
Hi Pamela. It's good to see that you have the story as well. I searched the blogs the best I could before I wrote anything about it and didn't see your post, which I am only finding out about now.
Also, I got the audio files by doing my own digging and so didn't need to credit anyone for them. The link I posted back to Chris Bowers, which I just now added here, but which appears at Booman and MyDD, indicates where I got the tip.
As for the bloggy gods, you misunderstood that sentence. I was grateful that Mike Conallen was on the call at all since it was a surprising thing to have happened and since it resulted in a good story.
Posted by: eRobin | August 12, 2006 at 02:10 PM
eRobin
I'm sorry about the misunderstanding - glad to have been in touch with you and happy to see this elsewhere. Curious whether you had transcribed? That's a lot of work!
Posted by: Pamela Leavey | August 12, 2006 at 07:17 PM