Web-savvy Libertarians in California have launched a nationwide movement to draft a New Haven-born celebrity pundit to take on Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd. Their first big test comes Saturday.
The pundit is Peter Schiff. He has been a fixture bashing the federal bank bailout and stimulus efforts on national TV news (FOXNews, CNBC, CNN) panels because of his early predictions of the Wall Street meltdown. He published a prescient book in 2007 called Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse..
“The man who saw it all before everybody saw it,” as Fox anchor Liz Claman introduced him. (Click on the play arrow to watch.)
Schiff, who now runs a Darien stock brokerage firm, served as an economic adviser to Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, whose candidacy was elevated by a then-unprecedented grassroots Internet effort. Schiff is the son of Irwin Schiff, a now 81-year-old national cult figure (currently sitting in jail as part of a political protest) in the Libertarian anti-tax movement.
Those same Ron Paul forces are now gathering dollars and potential workers to propel Schiff into taking on Democrat Dodd. Dodd’s popularity ratings have tanked in the wake of a personal financial mini-scandal and his stewardship of the widely criticized 2008 bank-bailout bill.
Dodd’s term expires in 2010.
The campaign has an online “headquarters” and assorted rallying cries, including: “Stop the Bailouts.” “Stop the stimulus!” It has Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter presences, too — even though Schiff insisted in an interview that he has had nothing to do with the effort and would almost definitely not heed a call to actually run.
That’s right. Almost definitely.
“Want Peter to run? Pledge! Show him we’ve got his back,” proclaims the home page for an affiliated site coordinating a “Moneybomb” for this Saturday.
A “moneybomb” means supporters are hoping to raise an eye-popping pile of pledges in one day to show serious support for a Schiff candidacy — the way a one-day moneybomb propelled Ron Paul’s candidacy a year ago with a record haul.
Lamont Right
In some ways the effort mirrors the early drive to find a candidate to challenge Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2006, only this time from the right, not the left. In 2006, activists from across the country who supported challenger Ned Lamont poured money and cultivated volunteers through left-leaning national websites like Daily Kos and MoveOn.org. The campaign was national from the start, born at the netroots.
A Schiff campaign would be, too.
The nascent nerve center is in San Diego, where six techies are putting together the websites, videos and moneybombing drive, in which supporters across the country are urged to donate money on the same money.
The web-savvy team, including a “social networking strategist” and “web community developer,” is running the operation out of an independent PAC called the Political Exploration and Awareness Committee (PEAC).
As with the Lamont effort, they formed out of an existing movement, in this case Ron Paul’s quixotic 2008 presidential bid. As with the Lamont effort, they’re making contact with like-minded web activists across the country with the idea of spawning independent pro-Schiff efforts.
While the six PEAC people came out of the Paul campaign, Chad Peace, “director of operations,” emphasized that newer supporters aren’t all Paul devotees. Peace, who signs emails “In Liberty,” said he and his colleagues formed PEAC in December “not specifically for Peter Schiff. He’s just the first person to whom we directed our purpose. It was formed to do these sorts of exploratory campaigns for anyone we can build a following around who believes in constitutional government.”
“When [he and the core PEAC-niks] started following Paul, we started hearing about Schiff,” Peace said in a conversation Wednesday. He was an economic adviser. We started listening to him. He made so much sense.
“We want to coalesce this national following. Connecticut was a perfect choice. None of us are here to throw balls at Dodd, especially personal attacks. But he has been a guy who has promoted this massive government intervention. He’s on a Prescription for Change tour trying to reinvigorate the universal health debate. Without knocking his intentions, as we can see with the mortgage meltdown, it’s the Dodd-like policies of big government that are killing us.”
As an independent political action campaign, PEAC can raise as much money as it wants to support a pro-Schiff drive — as long as they never coordinate directly with Schiff or any official campaign committee that might develop. Peace said the goal this Saturday is to raise just $10,000 to $15,000. The money “should give us enough to finish up the development of some high-tech software that we’re going to incorporate into the website.”
Less Money, Not More
Judging from a conversation with Schiff Wednesday, it will take much more than that to convince him to step away from his Darien stock brokerage and hit the hustings as a Republican challenger to Chris Dodd.
He does warm up — instantly — to the subject of why he feels Chris Dodd should be handed a forced retirement from the U.S. Senate.
“Dodd has a role in creating a problem. He’s not playing a part in the solution,” said Schiff, who’s 45. “He was one of the biggest promoters of Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac]. He’s one of the reasons efforts to rein them in was curtailed. The reason we’re in such a mess is the lax lending standards and moral standards that were a result of Fannie and Freddie. Dodd has his fingerprints all over this.”
More broadly, Schiff — unlike Dodd, President Obama, and the majority of U.S. senators and representatives — argued that the solution to the current recession is to avoid spending federal money, rather than bailing out lenders and businesses and homeowners and flooding the economy with loans and subsidies.
“We’re in trouble as a society. We spent too much money on consumer goods. We didn’t save enough,” he said, with a insistent delivery, honed on the TV pundit circuit, that turns bullet points into a fusillade. “We bought too much whether it was cars or telivision sets or iPods. We overpaid for a lot of stuff. We borrowed a lot of money…. We can’t pay the money back. That’s why all the financial institutions are in so much trouble — they loaned money to people who can’t pay it back.
“We need to acknowledge the mistakes we made in the past and right them. Let the credit crunch proceed. Put an end to consumer credit, which is what the market is trying to do. Americans need to stop buying things. We should all go on a couple of years’ buying hiatus. I can certainly go without any new clothes for a year or two or buying a new car or more stereo equipment. I’m sure most Americans can live pretty well for a while on the crap we own.
“We need to save our money. We need to earn a lot of money and not spend it. We need higher interest rates. We need lower asset prices. You’ve got a bunch of broke Americans living in expensive homes. The prices need to come down. Tuitions need to come down. The government is interfering with the market’s attempts to bring prices down. There is no solution that is not going to involve some pain. If people don’t go to the malls, people will lose their jobs. We have too many malls. We have too many people working on Wall Street. We don’t need to build new houses for a new decade.”
Schiff also faulted Dodd for his leading role in crafting the first stage of the federal TARP bank bailout, which gave then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson the authority to hand out billions of dollars without any public oversight over how the money was spent.
Pro-Stimulus
At this point the nascent Schiff pre-bubble hasn’t scared Dodd into moving right.
Asked for a response, Dodd spokesman Bryan DeAngelis lumped Schiff’s prescriptions into the “GOP failure” bin.
“As recent history has shown us, the Republican ‘stand by and do nothing’ approach
has failed our nation,” he wrote in an email message. “Senator Dodd continues to work every day for the people of Connecticut to develop solutions to the economic crisis — including his efforts to combat foreclosures, create sustainable American jobs, modernize our financial regulatory system, and put an end to the failed Republican policies that got us into this mess.”
Click on the play arrow to watch Dodd address the Freddie/Fannie issue.
Meanwhile, Peter Schiff is responding the netroots activity in his name with less than full encouragement.
“I’m not running for anything. They’re hoping if they can raise a lot of money and start an organization, they can convince me and draft me into a senate campaign. I think it is a longshot,” he said. “Is it impossible? Nothing is impossible. Is there is a slim chance? The odds are I’m not going to do it. It’s just not something I think is the best use of my time. Even if I could become a senator, I don’t know what the hell I could do! I would be one guy out of a hundred.”
If somehow he did run and then get elected, Schiff said he was certain he could never get re-elected. He would work hard not to bring home the bacon, or the pork, to people in Connecticut.
“I’d be voting against them all! I’d be trying to protect Connecticut residents from the government. I won’t be [advocating] pet projects.”