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Dirty Politics

A Four-Part Series on Opposition Research and Presidential Campaigns

When it comes to presidential elections, all politics is dirty. As Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis’s campaign manager in 1988, says, “He who doesn’t throw mud ends up covered in it.” The 2008 election has been no exception to the truth that Dukakis learned the hard way, and we can look forward to almost six more months of mud blizzards before Election Day clears the campaign skies in November.

Already the dirt has been flung far and wide. Forged e-mails sought to portray Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign as publicizing rival Rudy Giuliani’s links to an alleged pedophile priest.  John Edwards was mocked for pre-interview primping and a $400 haircut.  Barack Obama has spent much of the campaign fighting an Internet whisper campaign contending (falsely) that he is a Muslim, and a Pew Research Center poll in March found that 1 in 10 Americans still believed the rumor.

In any presidential campaign, successful candidates have two fairly simple imperatives. The first is relatively easy: to promote yourself. The other is to knock down your opponent. This side of the equation can get nasty — smears, misleading advertising, and outright dirty tricks make up the dark underbelly of the democratic process.  The political operatives whose specialty this is, known as opposition researchers, are widely considered the lowest form of life in the campaign business.  Their work happens below the radar screen and outside the polite forums of televised debates and Iowa barbeque cook-offs. It’s also what usually makes or breaks a candidate for the White House.

This year opposition researchers have changed the campaign in many ways, most notably by straining their eyeballs watching untold hours of sermon videos to find the controversial snippets that have led both Obama and John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, to break ties with preachers who supported them.

Their work is always secretive, but is growing less so.  The deathbed revelations of the famous GOP political strategist Lee Atwater included the news that George H.W. Bush had 35 researchers working on his 1988 campaign, all working to dig up dirt on Dukakis. Today, this would hardly come as a surprise to anyone.  Opposition research has become such an accepted part of campaigns that in August 2007 Michael Gehrke, the director of research at the Democratic National Committee, went public at a convention of bloggers to lay out the party’s research strategy, afterwards acknowledging to a reporter from Politico that much of his material “is discovered by people in their [the bloggers’] world.”

Gehrke, a lawyer who ran the opposition research arm of the Clinton White House and who worked on John Kerry’s 2004 campaign, makes just under $100,000; his counterpart at the Republican National Committee, Shawn Reinschmiedt, earns more than $80,000. Both oversee staffs of researchers who comb through the candidates’ records looking for inconsistencies or dumb comments that might work well in an ad or that could be pitched to reporters for some “earned media” (as opposed to the “paid media” of advertising).

For the 2008 primary season, the leading candidates and their national political parties are expected to spend more than $1 million on their top research staff — a bargain considering how much free media their slings of mud can attract.  By the time November rolls around, it’s widely projected that the candidates will have raised and spent more than $1 billion — and opposition research is such an efficient use of campaign money that it actually holds down costs. Dan Schnur, who served as McCain’s communications director during his 2000 presidential campaign, told the Center, that it is “generally accepted that a message delivered through the media is more credible than a message disseminated through paid advertising.” James Pinkerton, who supervised Atwater’s 35 researchers back in 1988, concurs.  “Opposition research,” he said in an interview, “if it’s true, is probably 5 or 10 times more effective than paid media.”

In addition to the traditional work of combing public records, Gehrke this year also sent out a fundraising appeal suggesting that the DNC was beefing up its “tracker” program. The party put video crews on the ground in the early primary states to follow almost all the candidates in the hopes of capturing another “macaca” moment, referring to the now-famous video of former Virginia senator George Allen calling an Indian-American tracker for his opponent’s campaign a “macaca,” an apparent racial slur. The video is thought to have cost Allen his 2006 reelection and squashed his plans to run for president. Now that John McCain is the Republican nominee, the DNC’s website features raw footage of his campaign appearances, collected by paid staffers and volunteers, who are hoping that McCain’s own words will work against him.

In 2000, the BBC filmed a documentary on the inner workings of the RNC’s opposition research operation called “Digging the Dirt.” The film focused on Barbara Comstock, the lawyer who oversaw the RNC war room. Comstock had been a senior aide to Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, during the heady years of the Clinton administration when Burton conducted investigations into Clinton fundraising and other White House scandals. Comstock beefed up the RNC’s research arm by hiring many of the same people who had worked with her on Capitol Hill, lawyers in particular. The Washington Post dubbed Comstock a “one-woman wrecking crew” in her targeting of presidential nominee Al Gore and other Democratic leaders.

Comstock’s deputy was Tim Griffin, a lawyer who had worked for Burton and, previously, for the special prosecutor who investigated Henry Cisneros, a Clinton administration secretary of housing and urban development who resigned in scandal. In the BBC documentary, Griffin is shown standing in front of a sign that says “ON MY COMMAND — UNLEASH HELL (ON AL).”