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Browne’s Illicit Payment Procured Him the Nomination
In the usual script for a political confession, the politician doing the confessing says that while he did break the rules, his actions really didn’t matter: If he had obeyed the rules the same outcomes would have come to pass. In the current context, if Willis were following the usual script he would be expected to say that while he broke the rules, Browne would have been nominated in 1996 anyway, so what he did for Browne was unimportant.
Willis actually says exactly the opposite. Unfortunately, Willis has an extensive record of making false statements, beginning with earlier claims that he was not taking secret payments from Harry Browne’s campaign. What did Willis claim, and should it be believed?
Quoting again from his May 11 memo, page 2:
“As of late 1995, the LP had only three direct-mail writers with proven track records: Michael Cloud, Bill Winter, and Perry Willis. Bill and I were employed by the LNC and a new policy prohibited us from assisting nomination campaigns.
“Michael Cloud was doing the Browne campaign’s fund-raising letters, but for reasons having nothing to do with Michael’s talent (in many ways he’s better than I am), the letters weren’t coming out on time and they weren’t pulling very well when they did.
“The Browne Campaign was doing aggressive, public outreach…It was also running deep into debt and was in danger of having to curtail its outreach activities. This would have had negative consequences for future fundraising that could have led the campaign to suspend operations entirely.”
and further down the page “This situation was critical. If the Browne campaign had to curtail or suspend its outreach, the party would go from one outreach-oriented campaign to none.”
Willis later examines the consequences of his actions. On page 3 of his memo:
“Would the Party be better off today if I had obeyed the policy?
“Even with my help the Browne campaign struggled to make it to election day. Without my help I don’t think they would have made it through the winter of 1995-96. Had I not disobeyed the so-called “conflict-of-interest” [GP: Willis’s quotation marks] policy(:)
“* The campaign’s outreach efforts would have stopped…”
Finally, on page 5 Willis says “There’s no question that if the Browne campaign had done less to benefit the party, fewer convention delegates might have voted for Harry. And if Harry’s campaign had shut down because it couldn’t generate fund-raising letters, one of the other candidates would have won by default.” But Willis has already said that only he could have generated those letters, without which Browne would have lost, so here Willis unambiguously claims that without his actions, another candidate would have won the 1996 Libertarian Presidential nomination.
Are Willis’s claims credible? Did he save the Browne campaign? Or is his memo a puff piece for his greatness, a bit of blustering bravado from the ego of a political operative caught with both hands in the cookie jar? Was Willis a good purchase for Browne, or did Browne waste the tens of thousands of dollars that his campaign appears to have funneled to Willis’s vicinity?
