Stephanie Mencimer

Reporter

Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent the last year hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.

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Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

A Secret Tea Party Donor Revealed

Movement leaders are jetting across the country in a donated plane to rally the tea party troops. Meet the deep-pocketed GOP donor who owns "Patriot One."

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Oct. 28, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

If tea party leaders jet around the country in a plane donated by a big GOP contributor, are they still "grassroots" activists? It's a question some local tea partiers would like to put to the leaders of the Tea Party Patriots, one of the nation's largest tea party umbrella groups, which claims to represent 15 million people. Over the past week, national coordinators Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin have been "flying for freedom" and "landing for liberty" across the country in a private jet they've dubbed "Patriot One" to help rally the tea party troops before the election. Along for the ride is an Atlanta filmmaker who's documenting the trip in videos posted on the group's national website. Like this one:

The videos, which show the tea party leaders traveling in the style of Wall Street investment bankers, are hardly a humble display of the usual tea party thrifty pluck. Instead, they show Martin and Meckler (wearing an oversized cowboy hat) getting on and off the jet, taking off in the jet, landing in the jet, even providing narration from inside the cockpit. "Patriot One: The Movie" has angered some tea party activists, especially because Meckler and Martin have not told their members who donated the sleek plane.

[Read the full article]

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If You Can't Find a Tea Party Group, Does it Really Exist?

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Oct. 25, 2010 11:00 AM PDT

If a tea party group won't talk to the press, does it even exist? Activists say yes, but it's a legitimate question, and one that came to mind this weekend while I was reading this interesting story in the Washington Post. In it, the Post published the results of its attempt to get an accurate census of the tea party movement and to gauge its impact on politics. The conclusions mirrored much of what I've noticed in the past year of reporting on the movement: While there may be a lot of conservatives out there sitting around their living rooms, holding hands and singing "God Bless America" and calling themselves a tea party, not all that many of them are well-poised to affect an election.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

'Tis The Season—For Push Polls

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Fri Oct. 22, 2010 4:04 AM PDT

New Hampshire Democrat Paul Hodes is in hot water again this week for allegedly using push-polls in his campaign for Senate. On Thursday, the New Hampshire Republican Party filed a complaint with the state attorney general alleging that Hodes' campaign had violated a state law banning push polls that don't disclose who paid for them. (Push polls are phone surveys that purport to gather opinion research but which actually use slanted questions to intentionally spread negative information about a candidate.)

The GOP complaint comes only a few days after Mountain West Research Center, an Idaho-based firm working for Hodes’ campaign, agreed to pay a $20,000 fine for violating New Hampshire's push-poll law during the GOP primary. (The Hodes campaign fired Mountain West when the allegations surfaced in July). The complaint filed Thursday involves a different firm, the DC-based Americans Direction Group. The Hodes campaign has denied commissioning push polls and said it was only gathering information.

'Tis the season for political dirty tricks, so these probably won't be the only push-polling allegations to surface in the last days before the Nov. 2 midterm election. But less than two weeks before the election, the push-poll embarassment does make Hodes' campaign look a little desperate. Hodes has consistently trailed in the polls since he announced he was running, and forecaster Nate Silver now gives him just a 7 percent chance of beating GOP nominee Kelly Ayotte, a former state attorney general. So even the best push polls probably won't be enough to save Hodes. But the fact that he'd employ the Mountain West Research Center (or someone who would subcontract with them) doesn't speak that well of his campaign. Here's why:

According to the Idaho secretary of state's office, the manager of Mountain West is David Haynes, who also happens to be the CEO of a Utah-based polling firm called Western Wats. That firm has been tied to push polling for more than a decade, starting at least as early as the 1996 presidential campaign, when Bob Dole admitted using the firm to push poll against Steve Forbes in Iowa during the GOP presidential primary. (The calls told voters that Forbes was not pro-life.)

Since then, Western Wats and the Mountain West Research Center have popped up regularly during competitive election seasons—frequently in conjunction with push-poll allegations. In 2006, democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont’s campaign reported that supporters had gotten push-polled by Mountain West during his primary challenge against Democrat Joe Lieberman. Western Wats also surfaced in the Vermont Senate campaign that year, tied to negative calls against the Senate’s only bona fide socialist, Bernie Sanders. But Western Wats really made news in 2008, when it was identified as the firm behind calls to voters in New Hampshire suggesting that Mitt Romney had dodged the Vietnam draft by serving as a Mormon missionary in France. The campaign behind those calls was never identified, though Rudy Giuliani was the leading suspect. (Ayotte, as attorney general, was charged with investigating the allegations.)

That's not all: some of those calls in previous years may have been made by underpaid children. In April, Western Wats settled a complaint with the US Department of Labor for serious violations of child labor laws. It agreed to pay more than $500,000 for reportedly employing more than 1,400 kids under 16 (some as young as 13) to staff its call centers. Many of the kids were paid less than minimum wage. Naturally, Western Wats dismissed the complaint as mostly full of "technical" violations, but the civil penalty was among the largest ever assessed by the Department of Labor for child labor violations.

None of this should have been a big secret to the campaign geniuses working for Hodes. But the campaign has claimed ignorance. His communications director Mark Bergman said in an email that the campaign did not engage Mountain West, but that one of its vendors had. Bergman says campaign staff was unaware of the connection "until we found they had not followed applicable New Hampshire law in July in conducting survey market research" and says the firm was let go immediately after. (By email, I asked Bergman whether the person or firm that hired Mountain West was also fired; he didn't respond.)

Of course, candidates (except maybe Bob Dole) never admit to having hired Western Wats or its related firm. The companies' names rarely show up on campaign disclosure forms because they are subcontracted through political consulting firms. Such an arrangement allows for plausible deniability should someone start complaining about dubious political phone calls. But it's especially curious that Hodes' campaign "vendors" chose to get down in the mud with such folks when Hodes is so likely to lose anyway. Far better, it seems, to lose gracefully than be forever listed in the annals of political dirty tricks.

The Democrats' Voter Privacy Fail

Do tea party pranksters have access to your personal information, thanks to Organizing for America's privacy-challenged get-out-the-vote campaign?

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Oct. 21, 2010 3:03 AM PDT

If you happen to receive a call from someone who says they're phoning on behalf of Organizing for America (OFA)—the successor group to Barack Obama's campaign machine—don't be surprised if he or she implores you to vote for tea party favorites like Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, or Rand Paul, or merely lambasts health care reform. The caller won't actually be a member of Obama's 13-million strong legion of campaign supporters, but rather a tea party prankster who has access to your personal information, thanks to OFA's privacy-challenged get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaign.

Ahead of the midterms, OFA, which was folded into the Democratic National Committee following Obama's election, has created an online "virtual" phone bank ostensibly for use by Democratic volunteers. As of Monday, the web page provided the names of Democrats who voted in 2008 but who aren't always regular voters, plus their phone numbers, ages, locations, and party affiliations. OFA also includes a script to use to encourage those voters to vote (and for the right candidates) on Election Day: "Will you help the president by committing to vote in your local elections in 2010, including the midterm elections on November 2nd?"

[Read the full article]

How the Tea Party's Like Herbalife

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Oct. 19, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

Tea party leaders love to talk about how their grassroots movement is a revolutionary new way of doing politics from the bottom up, organized more like a regenerating starfish than a top-down bureaucracy. But what if the tea party isn't a star fish but more of a pyramid? At least one of the biggest tea party organizations in the country, Tea Party Patriots, bears a striking resemblance to companies like Herbalife that operate what some critics consider nothing more than legalized pyramid schemes. And that's not just because, as I report today, one of the group's top leaders was a top earner at Herbalife. Consider some of the parallels:

CONSTANT RECRUITING

Herbalife: Ninety percent of Herbalife’s low-level distributors quit within a year, requiring constant recruitment to keep the company afloat.

Tea Party: Lorie Medina, a recruiter for the Dallas tea party, recently told the National Journal: "What I see is, every three, four, five months about 10 to 20 percent of your active people trail off. Those numbers have to be replaced every few months. It's a continual grind to keep the numbers up." Dawn Wildman, a California based national Tea Party Patriots coordinator, said: "The message is important, but people are expendable."

LOW OVERHEAD

Herbalife: By using "independent distributors," Herbalife keeps its costs low and shifts overhead to the little people.

Tea Party: National Journal touts cheapness as one benefit of the tea party's "leaderless" structure: "The network never outgrows the infrastructure, because each tea party is self-reliant. And the groups make it their business to seed more groups, producing sometimes dizzying growth."

FONDNESS FOR SIGNS

Herbalife: Responsible for ubiquitous telephone pole signs offering work from home deals.

Tea Party: Tea Party Patriots recently launched a “One Million Yard Signs” project as part of a “branding” and recruiting effort.

MEGA RALLIES

Herbalife: Motivational rallies, complete with testimonials, are a staple. Company founder Mark Hughes (who died of a drug overdose in 2000), once told rally crowds selling Herbalife products would make the world a better place.

Tea Party: Rallies often seem to be the movement’s raison d'etre. They often feature testimonials from an activist claiming that before the tea party, she had been "just a mom" who didn't care about politics, but now, her life has been transformed through work to make the country a better place for her children and grandchildren.

PEOPLE AT THE BOTTOM GO BROKE

Herbalife: Class action lawsuit settled in 2004 for $6 million alleged that thousands of people who signed on as Herbalife “supervisors” lost anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000.

Tea Party: Pam Silleman, a single mom who founded the Napa Tea Party in California, says she has depleted savings and run up $100,000 in credit card bills getting local tea party off the ground.

PEOPLE AT THE TOP MAKE $

Herbalife: The average "president's team" member, a group that makes up less than one percent of Herbalife’s distributors, reportedly grosses about $600,000 a year.

Tea Party: Jenny Beth Martin, a national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots has said she now earns $6,000 a month. Co-coordinator Mark Meckler, the former member of Herbalife's "president's team," draws a salary, too, though won’t disclose the amount. (Conspiracy minded and disgruntled patriots suspect it is at least six figures, paid with donations vacuumed up from local groups whose organizers are going broke.)

THRIVING IN BAD ECONOMIC TIMES

Herbalife: While the stock market was in a serious slump and the country in a dire recession, Herbalife’s stock price has more than doubled as the unemployed turn to desperate money-making schemes.

Tea Party: Didn’t exist before February 2009. Tea Party Patriots, for its part, now claims 15 million members.