I've been on a few campaigns in my day and I think that I've got the basics of what you need for a good staff. A campaign manager, field operation, fundraisers, media relations, lots of volunteers and a couple of lawyers are a good supplement to a great candidate. However, McCain is not a great candidate, he knows it and feels the need to add other types of political operatives.
If I were him and had one wish, it would be for a miracle. Aside from being a higher power, my miracle would not come in the form of Fred Malek. To say Malek has an ugly past would be an understatement. The last time a presidential candidate hired him the guy was pressured to resign almost on the spot. So why you ask is Fred such a bad boy?
From Media Matters:
On April 3, Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) 2008 presidential campaign announced that it had hired former Nixon staffer Fred Malek as its national finance co-chairman. However, as David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, noted in an April 3 entry on his Capital Games weblog, the McCain campaign's press release "left out an interesting piece of Malek's history: when he counted Jews for President Richard Nixon." As Corn reported, Nixon suspected that a "cabal" of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics was skewing economic figures to make the administration look bad and assigned Malek to report back on how many Jews were employed at BLS. When former President George H.W. Bush hired Malek as a top official at the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 1988, revelations in the press regarding Malek's work for Nixon reportedly led him to resign. McCain's hiring of Malek would seem to warrant the same disclosures from the media, but so far, only one news outlet other than The Nation has reported it.
Moreover, as Media Matters for America senior fellow Eric Boehlert documented, Politico senior writer Ben Smith "lean[ed] on lots of innuendo" in a March 13 weblog post in order to report that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has a "Jewish Problem," but failed to provide evidence substantiating that claim. Now that McCain has hired Malek, who allegedly aided President Nixon's attempts to expose the so-called "Jewish cabal" in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will the Politico investigate "McCain's Jewish Problem"?
So why would McCain leave that little tidbit out (and for that matter, why didn't Ben Smith report on it at the Politico?) while highlighting his financial abilities. Perhaps counting Jews isn't a part of a 2008 Presidential race, so maybe it isn't that important. Being a Jew myself (who is sitting in a coffeeshop salivating over all the delicious baked goods) I think that it is absolutely ridiculous to hire someone that carried out the wishes of that anti-semite (IMHO) Richard Nixon.
When George H.W. Bush hired him he was quickly let go of. People in 1988 realized that having that kind of press isn't the best to have when running for President. So why is the media (save for The Nation and Media Matters) not reporting on it? Media Matters offers tons of material (from the link above) on how this issue is being kept quiet in the press. It is time to put the pressure on the media and subsequently John McCain and fire Fred Malek.
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