Back in July, Republican ad man Jon Downs met with fellow veterans of George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign at a local IHOP for their quarterly professional catch-up.
“He said, ‘Unbeknownst to you guys, I’ve been working and I’ve signed with Ron Paul,’ ” Scott Douglas, a Republican political operative and Downs’s first boss in politics, recalled. “And my mouth dropped.” Douglas said others in the breakfast crew “twitched and laughed” and “rolled their eyes.”
Not anymore. Paul has inched in from the margins to position himself for an unexpectedly strong showing in the Iowa caucuses. His radical economic views are getting a fresh hearing in awful economic times, and his highly organized and well-funded ground game has attracted support beyond his base of young, committed Paul zealots.
But as much as Paul likes to claim that the mainstream has come to him, he has also pursued it. Exhibit A : Downs, a media mercenarywho is about as far as it gets from a traditional Paul revolutionary.
“I wouldn’t consider myself a member of his army,” said Downs, a self-described mainstream Republican, as he reclined on a recent evening in his downtown D.C. studio.
But Downs is engineering the campaign’s broadsides.
On Monday, the Paul campaign unveiled a Downs ad eviscerating Newt Gingrich as a Washington insider. An earlier, equally brutal ad out of Downs’s shop prompted a question during Saturday night’s GOP debate. Other Downs productions have included a frenetic, in-your-face spot called “Big Dog,” modeled on Ford’s F-150 truck ads, in which Paul is depicted as having the bite to back up his bark while his opponents are “whimpering like little Shih Tzus.” It received a sendup from Conan O’Brien.
(...) After graduating with a double major in political science and history from the University of Wisconsin, Downs arrived in Austin in the summer of 1999 to take a menial job with his uncle’s gardening Web start-up, Garden.com.
The position, he said, was really a “gig to allow me to pester the Bush people” at the campaign’s Austin headquarters. Drawn to the “compassionate conservatism” message of Bush, Downs showed up at Bush campaign headquarters and volunteered in the political shop. For four months he shredded papers and entered data, and his bid for a staff position in the correspondence department failed.
“I went back to my uncle and I was like, ‘Look, if I can’t even get a job in correspondence, what am I doing?’ ” said Downs, who grew up in the Northern Virginia community of Vienna, the son of a teacher and a father who owned a small packaging company.
He contemplated moving up at Garden.com, but stuck it out with Bush. His break came when Douglas dispatched him to the primary states. He proved his mettle, and in the general election he took on more responsibilities, becoming executive director of the campaign in Delaware. There he met his wife, Alicia, who had considerably more political experience at the time.
“There was a little rivalry,” Downs said. “She still won’t admit this, but she worked for me.”
“I couldn’t stand him,” said Alicia Downs, who consults for Mitt Romney’s political action committee.
(...) In the summer, Trigvy Olsen, a Republican strategist who worked on Rand Paul’s 2010 Senate race, reached out toChris LaCivita, a GOP strategist best known as media adviser to the Swift Boat Veterans who targeted John Kerry’s presidential campaign, for recommendations for an ad guy for the Ron Paul campaign. He suggested Downs.
The campaign approached him, and Downs said he talked it over with his wife, a Romney campaign veteran who works at Target Point media with Romney’s master microtargeter, Alex Gage, and consults for Romney’s Restore Our Future PAC. “It’s a small town,” Downs said. “Everyone is working on different races.”
Downs said he doesn’t show any of his Paul-related work to his wife before it’s public, and she insisted that they don’t even talk during the debates.
La última creación de Jon Downs es este web ad de ataque contra Gingrich:
The Washington Post:
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