First of all, in case you do not know, Jeff Weaver is the architect of the "Straight-Talk Express." No, not the term you hear flaunted around on the trail these days by the Arizona Senator. This was created over a decade ago by a GOP strategist who saw promise in a different kind of Republican....or so he thought. Weaver led the 2000 campaign and the 2008 attempt, only to be let go in the middle of last summer when McCain was all but out. Now Jeff Weaver is ready to straight-talk the straight-talk express, or what is left of it.
From The Texas Monthly:
Weaver is starkly pessimistic about the Republicans’ prospects this year. “We’re sailing into a hurricane in a wooden boat,” he told me. “We’re the party in power, so we’ll get blamed for the home loans crisis and government bailouts. There’s the ‘third [Bush] term’ issue, a recession, the wrong-track number—it’s ninety in Michigan, there may be a higher number somewhere, like Chechnya—gas prices, Nixon-like job approval, and an unpopular war. This isn’t like 1988, when we could win by talking about flag lapel pins and Willie Horton. Today, if you talk about these things, it’s talking about small ball. It will just piss people off.”
Sure enough, a few days later, when the McCain camp released a memo accusing his rival of self-aggrandizement, accompanied by a television ad negatively comparing Obama’s “celebrity” to that of Britney Spears’s and Paris Hilton’s, Weaver told Marc Ambinder, of the Atlantic Monthly, that his successors were adopting a style that “diminishes John McCain.” Calling the ad’s premise “childish,” Weaver noted, “John’s been a celebrity ever since he was shot down.”
Weaver is no longer shy about offering his critique of the campaign, or of the Republican party. He is, in many respects, a man with nothing to lose. At 49, he has twice been within reach of the ultimate achievement for a political consultant, to run a successful campaign for president of the United States. Twice he fell short. Nor have his struggles been confined to the political. In 2002 he was diagnosed with leukemia and started sixteen months of chemotherapy. (He has been free of the disease for almost four years.) As he told the New York Observer in 2004, shortly after the news broke that he had helped put McCain in touch with Democratic nominee John Kerry, leading to speculation that the Arizona senator might become Kerry’s running mate, “Get divorced, quit your job, switch parties, and get leukemia in one year—this is not a recipe for success.”
The article in TM goes much further into depth about Weaver's life and his upbringing in the Republican party with the help of another GOP politician and McCain confidante, Phil Gramm. Perhaps Weaver just got sick of the negativity he saw from the party he has worked for in the last twenty-plus years. Or maybe the break started with his separation from one-time partner and fellow Texan Karl Rove in the eighties. Whatever the case may be, it is refreshing to hear some candor from a (former) GOP insider.
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