Romney strategist's shady past clients revealed (Stuart Stevens)
Albania, Congo, now the USA.
Stuart Stevens Shady Past Clients, Revealed
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109214/stuart-stevens-shady-past-clients-revealed#
I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants, a couple of people in particular who have done races around the world, said Mitt Romney at the now-infamous private fundraiser in Boca Raton where he attacked the 47 percent. While those comments seized the countrys attention, these strange remarks largely escaped notice: These guys in the U.S.the Karl Rove equivalentsthey do races all over the world, in Armenia, in Africa, in Israel, he said. They do these races, and they see which ads work, and which processes work best, and we have ideas about what we do over the course of the campaign.
Id tell them to you, Romney joked, but Id have to shoot you.
For Romney to brag behind closed doors that his consultants are using tactics honed in foreign elections is peculiar, to say the least. The well-traveled consultants he praised were almost certainly his chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, and Stevens longtime sidekick, Russ Schriefer. And before taking charge of Romneys presidential campaign as its Karl Rove equivalent, Stevens helped lift at least two foreign strongmen into power, guiding them to victory in elections rife with irregularities and violence.
Stevens, whom The New Republic profiled in August, says he relishes politics for the smell of napalm in the morning, and, by his own admission, his political work is driven by something like a sublimated aggressionit provides an outlet for my violent tendencies. An article last month in Politico that portrayed Stevens as the target of vicious sniping within the campaign mentioned in passing that he worked in Albania and the Congo. But it didnt name the leaders whose campaigns he ran: Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha and Congolese President Joseph Kabila, authoritarian figures who have alarmed human rights groups and, at times, the U.S. State Department.
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