Politico: Angle's campaign sank candidate

Some people might ask why anyone would cover a campaign that is over and the candidate lost but this is one of those Lessons Learned moments that everyone running for office needs to read.

You don't hire friends to be Campaign Managers. You hire experienced people when you are running for a Senate seat especially against someone like Harry Reid. Tea Party people may be well intentioned but most don't have a clue about how to run campaigns unless they have been working in campaigns for some time. Most are neophytes to campaigns that someone like her Campaign Manager took full advantage of to get his way which cost her the seat. Not sure she would have won anyway with her stance on some issues but she would have had a better chance.

This is another case where the Tea Party Express and Sen DeMint went in full force for Sharron Angle which was a mistake. Don't think much vetting was done on some candidates as they looked for the most conservative to win the primary but in a lot of instances that person was not a good candidate for the general election. This 'purity' crap has to stop if we ever want to take the Senate. William F. Buckley was right when he said "The wisest choice would be the one who would win. No sense running Mona Lisa in a beauty contest. I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win.” It was true when he said it in 1967 and is true today.

Takes a lot to win a statewide election and from what was coming out of the campaign all along, there was no ground game by the Angle campaign. Her campaign manager is one of the more inept around although Christine O'Donnell and her campaign manager may be worse if that is possible. Then you can throw in Joe Miller and his campaign in Alaska. These candidates were not vetted properly before the primary when DeMint, Palin, and the Tea Party went all in.

Lessons learned from the Angle campaign is very simple -- wrong candidate was elected in the primary thanks to some people spreading false information about better candidates in order to get her the win. One thing I have learned in recent years is that sometimes the far right and the far left have some things in common like doing anything they can to get their candidate elected including lying if they need to or cheating to win.

We are seeing that in Alaska right now with Joe Miller who refuses to admit that he lost to Lisa Murkowski, the write-in candidate, and according to Anchorage Daily Senator Demint is still funding Miller who has lost except for the final certification which is being held up because of his lawsuit(s). Miller has been on Fox News lying several times and doesn't get called on it which is strange because anyone who has followed the race knows he is lying. Alaska GOP has told him to concede but Miller who was a bad candidate is still looking for more dollars and unfortunately, if the media is right Sen DeMint is sending him more.

Hope some people are realizing because someone was in the military does not make them the best candidate to run. Having been around the Air Force for most of my adult life, there are some really fine people I would vote for in a minute, and there are some I wouldn't vote for if they ran for dog catcher. It is like that in all walks of life and the military is no different.

This is one of the best critiques we have seen about the Nevada Senate race. For someone who supposedly got $14M in donations would like to know how the money was spent by the Angle campaign because most of the ads that went statewide were paid for by the NRSC. What a waste for the NRSC to spend $750,000 on this incompetent campaign. Will give than an "A" for effort as they were working with a candidate campaign that wouldn't listen and had a campaign manager who spent more time in his Missouri home than in Nevada. That was a seat that was winnable, but you don't win with bad candidates and their campaign staff. A good candidate would have taken advice they were being given by NRSC and others to heart instead of relying on friends.

Angle's campaign sank candidate

By SHIRA TOEPLITZ | 11/21/10 5:18 PM EST Updated: 11/21/10 6:13 PM EST

It’s widely recognized that in the marquee 2010 Senate race, Majority Leader Harry Reid ran a nearly flawless, textbook campaign, an operation so extraordinary that it enabled him to defy an almost certain political death.

It turns out he got some inadvertent inside help. Interviews with Nevada and Washington Republicans familiar with the campaign of Reid’s GOP opponent, Sharron Angle, describe a not-ready-for-prime-time effort that was equally astonishing — a model of dysfunction that was as bad as Reid’s campaign was good.

At the center of it was Terry Campbell, Angle’s closest adviser, who held the title of campaign manager.

A longtime political ally to Angle, Campbell ran her campaigns for the state Legislature almost a decade ago before taking the reins of her long-shot Senate primary bid along with another veteran supporter, Jerry Stacy, and several tea party volunteers.

Running a primary campaign out of the candidate’s living room, Stacy and Campbell were the only two staffers on Angle’s payroll — and the only two aides she thanked publicly in her June victory speech.

That proved to be the high point of the campaign.

In one occasion that was emblematic of the chaos that marked the fall effort, Campbell nearly scuttled an appearance by Sen. John McCain while the 2008 GOP presidential nominee was midair on the way to an Angle rally at The Orleans Hotel and Casino.

While McCain was en route to the event, held five days before Election Day, Angle was bombarded with calls from teary tea party activists who begged her not to campaign with the Arizona senator because they contended he was not conservative enough to appear on the same stage with her.

The source of the emotional appeals from some of Angle’s most loyal followers? Campbell himself did the urging, according to multiple sources with first-hand knowledge of the incident. Much to the relief of national Republicans, Angle ignored their pleas, and the McCain event went on without a hitch.

“In the 20 years that I’ve been involved politically, I’ve never had the misfortune of working with such sheer, utter incompetence. Too much is at stake in these political campaigns — people like Campbell don’t need to be anywhere near them,” said Chris LaCivita, who served as political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee this fall and worked directly with the Angle campaign. “If they were filming a sequel to the movie 'Dumb and Dumber,' Terry Campbell would have a feature role.”

After capturing the nomination, Campbell was consistently unaware of the daily metrics in the campaign, including the cash-on-hand situation and which advertisements were on the air, according to several Republican operatives who were frequently on conference calls with him.

Read more: Politico