Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat who lost to Santos, was a veritable opposition expert in a past life. How could he fail to deliver the Santos bombshell himself? [pucknews]

https://puck.news/the-real-santos-shocker/

Tara Palmeri

December 29, 2022

very day seems to bring a fresh revelation about D.C.’s new talented Mr. Ripley, George Santos. But for me, as a former New York Post reporter, the most shocking element is that none of this came out before the election, especially given the fact that his Democratic opponent was Robert Zimmerman, who had hired the powerful consultancy SKDK to run his campaign. Zimmerman is not some bright-eyed, political neophyte. He’s a political animal who knows the game as well as anybody, and certainly had the phone number of every News12, Newsday, Daily News and New York Post reporter to place such juicy allegations. He was a talking head on TV, a D.N.C. member, and a former political aide and appointee, who worked for two congressmen on Capitol Hill, in the New York State legislature, and later as an appointee in the Mario Cuomo administration. He moved on to hang his own shingle—a marketing and P.R. firm called ZE Creative Communications.

But here’s what I learned from an operative in another New York camp: Zimmerman, who was short on cash after an eight month, five-way primary in a reconfigured district, made some grave miscalculations. After being handed a half-baked oppo packet on Santos from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he decided against spending between $30,000 to $50,000 to develop that research, which would have made it easier to report and might also have turned up other falsehoods, like the fact that Santos is not Jewish or the mysterious origin of the $750,000 income that The New York Times reports is currently being investigated. Instead, Zimmerman had to raise $2 million in 10 weeks, so he decided not to make the investment. 

“With 10 weeks to go, I could not send a crew to Brazil to find out if he was a fugitive from the law,” Zimmerman told me. “I couldn’t afford to hire a genealogist, and frankly that’s why people who do opposition research turn to members of the media. Did I want this story out? Of course I did. Did I do everything we could? Of course I did. The frustration we had, outside of local media, many of them told us they didn’t have the personnel, money or the time to do it. The local media did in fact look at these issues and tried to address it as best they could. They are the frontlines of our democracies.” 

Former congressman Steve Israel, the former D.C.C.C. chairman who repped that Long Island district for 17 years, blamed the oppo failure in part on Democratic complacency in a Biden+8 district and a diminished press corps. Zimmerman may also have believed that by outing Santos for his lies, he would end up giving him more oxygen. After all, Israel’s successor Rep. Tom Suozzi was able to beat back Santos’s challenge in 2020 by largely ignoring him—but that was during Covid. 

“You can’t prosecute a campaign strategy in a rearview mirror,” Israel told me. “Could they have spent more money on opposition research? Yes. Could they have gone negative on Santos earlier? Yes. But each of those decisions has its own consequences and based on the pressures and polls they were dealing with, they made the best strategic decisions they could have at the time.”

Zimmerman said he took the race seriously and ran ads against Santos for his support of the insurrection and a national abortion ban. Local media interest for the race was obviously trumped by Governor Kathy Hochul’s tight race and Sean Patrick Maloney’s House race, plus the fixation over the narrative that it was a novel race between two gay candidates. “We went on the attack from day one,” Zimmerman continued. “We knew we were in a close race in a big Republican year, we did everything we could to expose him.”

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McCarthy’s Santos Dilemma

For now, Santos is McCarthy’s problem, and I certainly don’t expect you will hear a peep out of him before his leadership election on January 3, when he’ll need the conman, who lied about everything from his sexual orientation to his mother’s death, to contribute to the 218 floor votes he needs to become House Speaker. While Politico is reporting there’s increasing pressure on Santos by New York Republicans to announce that he won’t seek reelection in 2024, McCarthy may want him to hang around for a while, even if that means Santos is paid $175,000 in taxpayer money, possibly more than he ever made legitimately.

McCarthy’s calculus is likely this: If Santos is forced to resign early, that would prompt a special election. At the very least, McCarthy’s leadership fund would have to spend about $5-7 million to defend that seat, and even then, Democrats will likely win. The narrative might then fixate on McCarthy’s slim majority becoming even slimmer. That will surely put a damper on fundraising for 2024 and draw questions about his own leadership. Who knows, if he’s made speaker after giving in to the Freedom Caucus’s motion to vacate demand, it could even trigger his ouster—or, at the very least, make his leadership hell just a bit more hellish.

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