TITLE

Greg Mueller
Greg Mueller, Twitter profile, 2021-08-15 (note prominent "Catholic" self-description)
Name	Greg Mueller
Born
Birthplace
Died
Nationality
Religion	practicing Catholic
Occupation
Description
Known for
Associations	Leonard A. Leo Former press secretary, Pat Buchanan presidential campaign
Website	CRCAdvisors.com [ CRCStrategies.com redirects here ]

Background

... Greg Mueller is president of a little-known Alexandria public relations firm, a hard-charging outfit called Creative Response Concepts (CTC). With a client list that includes the Christian Coalition,   Human Events magazine, and Regnery Publishing, CRC describes itself as the "blue-collar" communications arm for the conservative movement. That's blue collar as in not blue chip. Plain bagels from a torn paper sack on South Washington Street. Not big-think breakfasts at the elegant Hay-Adams.

"In the big picture, we're a little piece of the pie," explains Mueller, who has the build of a small-college linebacker and the earnest pitch of a small-town car salesman. "We're purposely not K Street. ... We come in every day and hustle. ... We're kind of on the outside looking in."

In pivotal moments, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has been known to tap CRC to help carry the party's message beyond the Beltway -- to the readers of the Register Star in Rockford, Ill., and the listeners of Blanquita Cullum's talk radio shows, all 65 stations worth, from Richmond to Palm Springs.

Three years ago Creative Response Concepts (CTC) was hauled in to promote the Contract With America. The firm helped dozens of neophyte GOP candidates generate local media attention across the country, fend off attacks and incorporate the contract's planks into their campaign strategies. Party bigwigs were impressed. Now, the RNC has tapped CRC to help marshal conservative activists and sell the party's tax-cut message throughout the country.

As outsiders, GOP pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick says, CRC is doing "a phenomenal job at a time when a lot of people within the party feel like the congressional Republicans are failing them."

Explaining the party's public relations travails, Mueller says, "I don't think we're being as a party, and a movement, creative enough. A lot of our focus is too much inside the Beltway." "What we need to do," says Keith Appell, a CRC spinmeister, "is go back to doing Reagan."

Taking the Heat

The ideas start bubbling up at CRC's 9:30 a.m. daily staff meeting, where 10 conservative apostles gather around a conference table at the firm's modest suite of suburban offices. By lunchtime, the ideas are ricocheting off walls, sometimes rising to grand strategy, sometimes petering out.

What about a "back-to-school tour" this fall with Republican congressional leaders hitting inner cities from Detroit to Los Angeles touting school choice? What about a three-day "Promises Made, Promises Kept" tour right now, featuring Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott talking about cutting taxes and balancing the budget at steel mills and state capitols and family farms? What about getting Republicans to gather on the Capitol steps and read excerpts from President Kennedy's 1963 speech promoting broad-based tax cuts? (Soundbite: "Mr. Clinton, you're no Jack Kennedy.")

CRC's chairman and 50 percent stockholder is Leif E. Noren, a soft-spoken, professorial fellow who coaches girls' basketball in his spare time. With CRC's staff of mostly twenty- and thirtysomethings, Noren is, at 43, the resident grandpa. In the 1980s, during the heyday of the conservative movement, Noren was treasurer and executive director of the National Conservative Political Action Committee.

Leif E. Noren founded CRC in 1989 with $15,000, and has since converted a fledgling direct-mail operation into a blossoming political and public relations tiger. (There are eight outside investors.) This year, Noren says proudly, the firm expects to gross $1.8 million -- a sum that still puts it in the little leagues, galaxies away from the planet of PR heavyweights like Hill & Knowlton or Edelman Public Relations Worldwide.

Still, CRC's reputation is growing in Republican political circles. That is due in large part to Mueller, the firm's hyperactive president, and Appell, his hyperactive sidekick. They are the Batman and Robin of CRC.

Appell, 36, the firm's wiry senior account executive-political consultant, bears a slight resemblance to comedian Chevy Chase and has the wit to match. He talks fast. His delivery is good. In addition to doing a great Phil Gramm impersonation, he has the cornball charm of a carnival huckster. He was born to sell.

Voice-mail message to Washington Post reporter, June 11, 2:30 p.m.:

Check this out, CRC strikes again ... We're launching a coalition to push for school choice in D.C. Bipartisan coalition. Being led by none other than Alveda King, Dr. King's niece. She will say at this news conference tomorrow ... that school choice is the next level for the civil rights movement. This, as the Republicans are getting beat over the head with the flood aid issue and just prior to Bill Clinton's racial relations speech. ... . Are we good or what? I'm not trying to blow our horn, but I mean, man! You ought to be there.

Mueller, 34, is best known as Pat Buchanan's communications director during his 1992 and '96 presidential campaigns. From the car phone or the van phone, he would dial up reporters all over America, trying to line up interviews for Buchanan and making him available to react to the latest news on the wire. Talk radio. Alternative weeklies. Local cable. Anywhere an audience could be found.

Operating on a small budget, the campaign could not compete over the paid airwaves, so it became the master of carefully staged events that were sure to draw "earned media," as the consultants call it, and generate newsworthy pictures -- like Buchanan strapping on a six-shooter at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.

Mueller's resourcefulness impressed his Republican opponents. "He is one of the most capable press operatives in the party," said Scott Reed, Bob Dole's '96 campaign manager, who recently recommended that party officials use CRC more often. "He gets more done in a morning than most press secretaries get done in a week. ... He is very versed in the hand-to-hand combat."

Reed should know. After it became clear that Dole had wrapped up the GOP nomination, Buchanan refused to rally around the presumptive nominee. For months he was a pain, threatening to bolt the party and run as an independent in the fall.

Mueller has had a lot of experience in the role of political firefighter. He has had to defend Buchanan against charges of racism, antisemitism, protectionism, immigrant bashing and of being a GOP turncoat -- especially in 1992 when Buchanan challenged a sitting Republican president, George Bush. "I'm not being invited down to the George Bush library dedication," Buchanan quipped, "and Greg is probably not either. But he showed he had courage. He is willing to stand up for his beliefs. You don't want yes men, and Greg Mueller is not a yes man."

And if you're a conservative flamethrower, as some of CRC's clients have been, you need PR people who won't wilt under intense heat.

When Regnery Publishing unveiled Gary Aldrich's "Unlimited Access" last year, the book was billed as an expose of security lapses inside the Clinton administration. It was a New York Times bestseller, but was aggressively attacked by White House officials and picked apart by some journalists -- especially a section in which the retired FBI agent wrote that it "appears that the president is a frequent late-night visitor to the Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington" and that "some information indicates" that Clinton's hotel companion is female and may be a celebrity.

Aldrich continues to stand by the book's account. But in a recent New Yorker article, Jane Mayer writes that Aldrich had, in fact, backed away from the Marriott Hotel allegation in an interview with her. CRC's response? It claimed Mayer has a left-of-center bias and it tried to undermine her credibility as a journalist. "A message went out," Mueller acknowledges. "You've got to be careful when you're dealing with her."

But David Brock, the American Spectator writer who was once the darling of the Right, also has taken shots at the book and the PR machine. In the July issue of Esquire, he writes that Regnery "perpetrated a hoax on the public by celebrating Unlimited Access' as legitimate and well-researched," but that Aldrich had based the passage about Clinton's hotel trysts on a rumor that Brock himself had just mentioned in passing. Brock, who is gay, says that to undermine his criticisms "Aldrich's PR people put out the word among conservatives that my real problem was not the book's truthfulness but Aldrich's anti-gay rhetoric."

Mueller denies any effort by CRC to discredit Brock. He says that he believes Brock's criticism of the Aldrich book stemmed from his desire to gain credibility with the media establishment before publication of Brock's book last fall on Hillary Rodham Clinton. "But frankly," Mueller says, "I got no problem with Brock. ..."

Republican strategist Greg Mueller in Pat Buchanan's hotel room on primary day (2006).
[Source]

Additional Reading

Return to Persagen.com