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Dirty Politics – Part Four

“All Smear, All the Time”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign created a stir in December 2007 when one of its operatives began dishing dirt on Barack Obama in an interview with The Washington Post. Billy Shaheen, Clinton’s New Hampshire co-chair and husband of former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen, told The Post that he thought Obama was unelectable because the GOP would have a heyday with his former drug use. (Obama wrote in his first book that he had experimented with marijuana and cocaine while in high school and college.)

“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Shaheen said. “There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.” Instead of bringing attention to Obama’s past drug use, the comment instead brought a heap of criticism on to Clinton’s campaign. Clinton apologized for the comment, which she said was unauthorized by her campaign, and Shaheen was forced to resign.

It was hardly the first forced resignation due to such embarrassment.  For years after Richard M. Nixon resigned as president due to the Watergate scandal, and several of his aides went to prison for campaign-related crimes, opposition research was considered so disreputable that campaigns and political parties kept it under wraps. In 1987, Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden was forced out of the race after allegations that he’d plagiarized speeches from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock and Robert F. Kennedy, and that he’d also plagiarized during law school.  The allegations surfaced in a videotape aired by TV news outlets of Biden giving the speech taken from Kinnock.

The allegations were true, if perhaps overblown — Biden had given attribution to Kinnock on many other occasions, but not in the speech that was taped. When word leaked, however, that the video had come from inside the campaign of opponent Michael Dukakis, Dukakis held a press conference decrying the move, and his top aide, John Sasso, resigned. While Dukakis distanced himself from the maneuver, in a 2008 debate Hillary Clinton pounced on Obama for recycling portions of a 2006 stump speech by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

And sometimes opposition research just falls flat.  In 1980, Democrats had mountains of negative material about Ronald Reagan, but as one complained: “We had about as much negative material on Ronald Reagan as one could hope to have on any candidate, and it didn’t do us a damn bit of good. The voters didn’t think it was relevant.”

Nonetheless, opposition research has been a staple of presidential campaigns as long as there have been campaigns.  The research is a relatively small expense in an election season now widely projected to cost the candidates no less than a combined $1 billion.  When it works, whether presented accurately or distorted, it is a highly efficient use of campaign dollars to weaken an opponent.

Many of the most damning blows come straight out of the public records mined by opposition researchers. In 1992, for example, George H.W. Bush scored major points in Michigan against Patrick Buchanan, a primary opponent, by running an ad pointing out that Buchanan drove a foreign car.

Other techniques are more questionable.

The most famous example, of course, is the 1988 Willie Horton ad run by supporters of George H.W. Bush in 1988 against Michael Dukakis, then the Massachusetts governor. The ad grew out of extensive focus groups conducted by the Bush campaign that concluded that Dukakis, who was until then running a strong campaign, was weak on crime.