"Surrogate Media Operations" and GOPUSA -- could be important

[starroute]

GOPUSA's Christmas 2004 greeting mentions a bunch of people to whom they owe special thanks. The list includes Karl Rove and his deputy Tim Goeglein. It also includes the name of Julie Cram, who is now with Burson-Marsteller, but who was previously with the Bush campaign.

http://www.bm.com/pages/news/releases/2005press-02-08-2005

For the past four years, Cram has worked closely with the Bush Administration in a variety of strategic communications positions. Most recently, she worked for Bush-Cheney ‘04 as the Deputy Communications Director for National Surrogate Media; with the Republican National Committee as the Director of Communications for Victory 2004; and as Director of Surrogate Media Operations for the Republican National Convention.

Surrogate media? That means exactly what you think it means:

http://blogs.salon.com/0002042/2004/08/21.html

August 21, 2004

Today’s political lesson comes from the world of animal recognition and anatomy: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it’s a duck.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now enough about these “swift boat veterans for truth (SBVFT)” not being created, funded, encouraged and used by Karl Rove and the Bush campaign to smear the good name of John Kerry. They were and they are.

<snip>

And just look at how the SBVFT issues and ads have been played by the Bush Surrogate media. The book (at 256 pages, a pamphlet, really) – now shown to be rife with inaccuracies and lies – was teased for two weeks on Drudge, who is always willing to spin out the most far-fetched aspects of the Rovian oeuvre (lately headlining a Kerry haircut and a supposed squabble between Kerry and Teresa). The Bush Media Surrogates kicked in the week before the pamphlet’s release, with “exclusive” interviews with “co-author” O’Neill (the other author and other Swifties banished to the background, for obvious reasons). When the SBVFT “ads” were released, the Bushies had to put very few actually on the air – they got much more play for free on Fox, MSNBC and the thousands of radio outlets that subscribe to the Rove daily e-mail.

In other words, the Bush Surrogates conducted a concerted and remarkably coordinated campaign to make sure everyone heard about the Swifties’ trumped-up and relatively minor allegations against Kerry – at worst, he appears to be charged with puffery – at a time when he had just made his most effective personal impact at the convention.

In other words, not only is the White House very consciously using groups like GOPUSA to do their dirty work for them, they actually had somebody acting as a Director for it during the campaign. And GOPUSA feels they owe special thanks to that person.

This could be worth some further research.