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FirmhandKY -> RE: Latest Democratic Dirty Tricks (5/4/2008 10:12:02 AM)
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FR:
One of the better articles about political dirty tricks, even if it is from the 2004 Presidential campaign, and it has plenty for all sides, Dem or Repub:
Playing Dirty
by Joshua Green
June 2004 Atlantic Monthly
Some interesting excerpts:
Attempting to define a political opponent as something less than presidential is a hallowed American tradition. Two centuries ago, in attacks that echo in Republican characterizations of John Kerry, Federalist opponents assailed Thomas Jefferson with what amounted to the charge that he—a free-thinking deist who sympathized with the French Revolution—was in fact a godless Francophile bent on destroying the institution of marriage. Andrew Jackson's marriage to a woman he wrongly believed to be divorced, Grover Cleveland's illegitimate child, and Teddy Roosevelt's alleged drunkenness were all pushed by opponents during nasty presidential campaigns.
After Watergate and Nixon's dirty tricks, carrying out surreptitious attacks, even those based on the truth, took on a measure of risk. During the 1987 race for the Democratic nomination Michael Dukakis's campaign manager, John Sasso, and his political director, Paul Tully, slipped to several media outlets a videotape that showed an opponent, Senator Joseph Biden, delivering a speech partially plagiarized from the British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. This prompted further scrutiny, and subsequent revelations of plagiarism and academic exaggeration drove Biden from the race. When it was learned that his campaign had supplied the damaging tape, Dukakis felt compelled to call a news conference and later fired his aides.
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In the 1992 Senate race in California, Bob Mulholland, a state Democratic Party official, learned that the Republicans' morality-and-values candidate, Bruce Herschensohn, frequented a Sunset Boulevard strip club. Four days before what looked to be a close election, Mulholland confronted Herschensohn at a campaign event waving a poster-size photo of the club and its marquee: LIVE NUDE—GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS. Last July, Representative Darrell Issa, who launched the campaign to recall the California governor Gray Davis, was revealed in a front-page San Francisco Chronicle story to have been arrested twice in the early 1970s, for weapons charges and auto theft—a story that was the handiwork of Davis researchers. And although no one has yet proved it to be so, an article of faith among Republicans (and some Democrats) is that the revelation on the eve of the 2000 election that George W. Bush was once arrested for drunk driving was a particularly devious plant by the Gore campaign. "You can't Botox your record these days," Comstock says. "You can't hope anymore that no one will go in and look."
It is perhaps not surprising that oppo research is among the more reviled professions, its practitioners held in about the same regard as spammers and ivory smugglers. This breeds defensiveness and a tendency for researchers to invoke a variation of the NRA claim that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Lehane says, "One of the greatest misperceptions is that opposition research is going out and finding stuff that's not already in the public domain. But the reality is that most of the stuff that really ends up having an impact is stuff that's out there in the public record." Two years ago a Democratic researcher named Jason Stanford was moved to write an article in the trade journal Campaigns & Elections that was as notable for its impassioned defense of his vocation as for his candid admission that rather than admit to her son's line of work, his own mother tells people he's a used-car dealer.
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Both parties now disseminate daily e-mails with headings such as "Sen. John Kerry's Hypocrisy, Vol. 1, Issue 10" and "Bush White House: Home of the Whopper," which contain quotations, links, audio, and even video of what is often accurately judged to be damaging or compromising information. Contrary to the popular impression that campaigns traffic mainly in sleaze and rumor (though this occurs too), these e-mails are almost always scrupulously sourced from the public record. The goal is not to spread untruths but to have journalists repeat a selective—and often deeply misleading—version of the truth.
Firm
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