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  Carol Felsenthal: Pat Caddell a "Liberal Democrat?" No He's Not!
Reported by Huffington Post on Friday, 6 November 2009 (on November 6, 2009)
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I\'ve been thinking about political operative Pat Caddell for years, but haven\'t written about him because I figured that anyone interested enough to care about the subject must know that Pat Caddell is quite conservative--and rarely disagrees with cable pundits such as Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck. I\'ve watched Caddell, a contributor to Fox News, on so many panels, supposedly there to represent the liberal view and spar with the conservative---but instead he agrees with the conservative almost all the time.
I was prompted to write this afternoon when I read Peter Nicholas on the Chicago Tribune\'s \"The Swamp.\" Nicholas quotes a Democratic consultant who received a \"blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel...\" This person, unnamed because he/she fears that Obama\'s people will retaliate by hitting him where it hurts--in the wallet--said that the tone of the call was \"intimidating.\" He told Nicolas that there was an \"implicit suggestion,\" (Nicholas\'s words) that, in the consultant\'s words, \"Clients might stop using you if you continue.\"
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn denied that anyone from the White House was making any such threat.
Nicholas then quotes Pat Caddell, now 59, who came into the public eye as pollster for Jimmy Carter--while still at Harvard, he polled for George McGovern--and over the years has been sharply critical of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and other establishment Democrats. Caddell told Nicholas that he had talked to Democratic consultants who had confirmed the threats but, no surprise to me, Caddell declined to give their names.
Some research turns up the following:
--On August 24, 2009 on Glenn Beck\'s show, Caddell described himself as a \"liberal Democrat.\" and then bashed the Obama administration\'s economic policies, Attorney General Eric Holder, etc. He asked if President Obama is \"disingenuous,\" called the democratic party under Obama both \"elitist\" and \"revolutionary,\" brought up the names of George Soros and Rahm Emanuel, and agreed with Beck about the evilness of Obama\'s soon-to-be-former green jobs czar Van Jones
--On August 13 on Glenn Beck\'s show with Karl Rove and Andrew Napolitano, Caddell took off after Rahm Emauel: .
CADDELL: He leaves the Clinton White House and he gets two jobs. He gets put on the board of Freddie Mac, which is the second of the big giant mortgage companies.
BECK: What is his -- what is his qualification? Didn\'t he go to school for dancing?
CADDELL: He studied ballet dancing in college. He was trained for ballet. He is.
BECK: Freddie Mac doesn\'t do ballet.
CADDELL: No, that\'s true.
BECK: Yes.
CADDELL: Now, he gets. The other job he has is that he gets a job with Wasserstein Perella, which is a major Wall Street deal company, and he gets in their Chicago office. And he then made $16 million in less than two years.
BECK: In two years?
CADDELL: Yes.
BECK: Two years, $16 million is what he makes.
CADDELL: On top of the quarter million taxpayers gave him for Freddie Mac.
BECK: And $250,000. Wait, he was there when -- he was there.
CADDELL: He was there when they\'re cooking the books.
BECK: Yes. He was there.
CADDELL: This is -- they were cooking the books there.
BECK: Got it. OK. Sixteen million dollars -- how did he make the $16 million?
CADDELL: Paid $16 million basically on one large deal and there\'s a second one. But a big deal he got it on was he was advising SBC which later grew into the new AT&T.
BECK: OK, SBC.
CADDELL: Right.
BECK: That\'s not really -- here\'s what\'s interesting about the SBC thing, is, the guy who helped make this deal.
CADDELL: Yes.
BECK: . took a loss, did he not?
CADDELL: Yes. They had to sell because they bought another phone company, Ameritech. They had to get rid of a security company called SecurityLink. It was $1 billion, $1, $1.5 billion investment. He sold it to a group headed by -- an investment group being led by.
BECK: Whitacre?
CADDELL: No, by -- this Whitacre was the chairman. He sold it to a group led by Mr. Emanuel for about $500 million.
BECK: OK.
CADDELL: Six months later -- six months later, the investment bank that bought it sold it for $1 billion.
....CADDELL: Now, and he took out a huge amount of money. Now, the president at that time, Whitacre was the chairman of SBC.
BECK: America, does the name Whitacre, the guy who helped Rahm Emanuel
make $16 million, does the name Whitacre ring a bell? Pat?
CADDELL: Because, when they appointed the new chairman of G.M., who announced the day of his appointment, I know nothing about the car business, his name was Edward Whitacre.
BECK: Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness! It\'s the new chairman of G.M. that knows.
CADDELL: Well, it gets better. It gets better, because the second name down in the corner, Bill Daley, brother of the mayor, who is the really, the powerful force. I said this on the air in 2008, a person pulling the strings in the Obama campaign was Bill Daley. One of his closest friends, one of his closest confidantes is a person named Jim Johnson. Jim Johnson was the chairman of Fannie Mae. He had been -- his qualifications for the largest mortgage company in the world was that he had been Walter Mondale\'s campaign manager.
BECK: Oh.
CADDELL: And he puts him on the board there.
....CADDELL: It is a -- it is a cancer on the society. No one will touch this story. Nobody has made this connection in the media, well, because they have decided they have a new role, which is to serve as lackeys.
....BECK: They are in deep trouble. And you bring any connections, you keep helping us and I will air the story to my last breath.
CADDELL: There is so much to uncover here. It is like the beginning.
BECK: You stay close to us, sir, and we will uncover it.
CADDELL: Will do.
--August 12, 2009, Cadell appeared on Sean Hannity\'s \"Great American Panel\" along with Ann Coulter--Coulter and Caddell are friends-- and Mercedes Vianna Schlapp who worked in George W. Bush\'s White House.
HANNITY (to Caddelll): I\'ll start with you as a Democrat on this panel. Are you happy with the names the Democratic Party, the DNC, the attacks against the American people that we\'ve been witnessing at these town halls?
CADDELL: Let me just say, you know, as a Democrat, we\'re supposed to be the party of the common people. I\'ve never known a situation where the president -- remember the DNC is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the White House.
HANNITY: You don\'t deserve to call yourself a Democrat, because you\'re making too much sense. I mean...
When he was polling for Jimmy Carter, Caddell, then 29, was the impetus behind Carter\'s disastrous \"malaise speech.\" (As explained in a new book on the subject, What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President, the speech, delivered from the Oval Office on July 15, 1979, temporarily boosted Carter\'s ratings, but only temporarily.) In retrospect, says the book\'s author Kevin Mattson, unfairly, the speech came to be seen as one of many disasters of the Carter President--and a factor in his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Perhaps Caddell, who went on to consult for the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Gary Hart, and Joe Biden has been a double agent all along.
I\'m not the first to point out Caddell\'s politics. Many came before me, but none that I\'ve noticed lately. In late 2000, lefty turned righty David Horowitz, praised Caddell: \"Pat Caddell is a Democrat with a Conscience. Is there another?\"
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