Meet the Man Who Created a PR Cult for Right-Wingers
While he professes to love the Lord, and he and his staff attend Monday morning Bible study, he also loves living large; Cuban cigars, high fashion suits, blue alligator shoes, a gold Rolex watch for starters. He's loud, outgoing, and charismatic. Based in Ohio, he's also got a Washington, D.C. multi-million dollar row-home office called Eastgate, named after the East Gate of Jerusalem. As bonuses, successful employees -- described in one report as a "small army of raucous, elbow throwing … mischief makers" -- receive Tag Heuer watches, keys to luxury sedans, lavish business trips, and more. He has a history of creating negative political advertisements that might make the late Lee Atwater blush. Meet Rex Elsass, who in an excellent profile by Jason Zengerle in the March issue of GQ, is described as "the most powerful Republican operative you've never heard of."
And in my case, someone who has been monitoring and reporting on conservative movements for quite some time, Zengerle was right on the money; I never had heard of Rex Elsass until reading the GQ piece.
Elsass is the founder and CEO of the Strategy Group for Media which, according to Zengerle, is a "consulting firm [that has] a knack for launching a certain kind of politician -- and a record of recent success that has turned [him] into one of the richest, not to mention most controversial, operatives in Republican politics."
Some fellow political consultants seem to be well aware of Elsass, and some of them have a low opinion of his dirty-tricks approach to political consulting, characterizing him as "unscrupulous," "two-faced," and "Elmer Gantry-ish." "We are not all like Rex," said one GOP strategist. "He gives every other political consultant a bad name."
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/meet-the-man-who-created-a-pr-cult-for-right-wingers
