Shadow Party Strikes with Romney ‘Cancer Ad’

My August 10, 2012 article from Front Page Magazine:

Shadow Party Strikes with Romney ‘Cancer Ad’

By Matthew Vadum

A shadowy political operative with ties to organized crime is behind the now-infamous TV ad in which ex-steelworker Joe Soptic falsely blamed his wife’s tragic cancer death on Mitt Romney’s venture capital firm shuttering his place of employment.

Behind-the-scenes power broker Harold Ickes is a major player in today’s Democratic Party. A registered lobbyist and shill for leftist causes, Ickes is a longtime Clinton loyalist, who previously served as deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and in senior posts in the presidential campaigns of both Bill and Hillary Clinton. During the 2004 election cycle, Democratic strategist Howard Wolfson said that – outside of the John Kerry campaign— Ickes was “the most important person in the Democratic Party today.”

When he did damage control for President Clinton Ickes called himself the administration’s “Director of Sanitation.”