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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.

Near the end of the election, an outside group, the National Security Political Action Committee, launched an ad attacking Dukakis for allowing the Massachusetts corrections department to give 10 weekend furlough passes to a violent criminal named Willie Horton. While out on a weekend pass, Horton twice raped a young woman and stabbed her boyfriend before stealing their car. Dukakis didn’t personally furlough Horton, but he had vetoed legislation that would have banned furloughs for convicts like Horton who were serving life sentences without parole.

The original ad didn’t include a photo of Horton, an African-American, but later versions did. Ad creator Larry McCarthy called the photo, “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.” The ads immediately generated an onslaught of media coverage and cries from Democrats that they were racially charged smears.  The ads, which were based on opposition research generated by Bush aides James Pinkerton and Andrew Card, were not paid for by the Bush campaign, which was able to distance itself from the racism charges. The Bush campaign instead aired a milder ad that criticized Dukakis on the weekend furlough issue without mentioning or showing Horton. In the end, the ads totally shifted the debate and helped propel Bush to a come-from-behind victory.

The Horton ad became synonymous with negative campaigning, but its success also demonstrated the virtues of opposition research wielded deftly to manipulate the media and change the subject in a close election. That’s just what George W. Bush needed to do in 2004, when he was running a tight race with John Kerry. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had a leg up on Bush, who had not only avoided Vietnam by getting a cushy National Guard post arranged through political connections, but also hadn’t even completed his Guard service.  Bush needed to shift the focus of the debate away from his lack of credentials and to poke a hole in Kerry’s biggest perceived asset: his military service.  Vulnerable to being labeled a draft-dodger, Bush couldn’t make the attacks himself; they wouldn’t be perceived as credible.

Instead, in May 2004, a group of Vietnam veterans assembled at the National Press Club for a press conference denouncing Kerry as “unfit to serve” and accusing him of distorting his service record in Vietnam. When the press conference didn’t generate much news coverage, the group created a series of TV ads that were aired in contested election areas. But even though the ads included statements from vets who, like Kerry, had served in Vietnam and on Swift Boats, most of them had not served with Kerry and were not in a position to judge his performance there. Nonetheless, they were extremely effective messengers, and their message was created with enough hard facts that it took the Kerry campaign a long time to find a compelling way to respond.

One of the Swift Boat ads used Kerry’s own words against him, though out of context. The ad contained footage of him testifying in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recounting the results of an investigation into war crimes committed by American soldiers. The testimony was contrasted with charges from former POWs who said that Kerry’s testimony had betrayed soldiers in Vietnam.  The ads weren’t broadcast for very long, but they generated a gold mine’s worth of media coverage from traditional news outlets, which kept the story alive and moved the focus on the media away from Bush and onto Kerry. Many observers credit the ads with Kerry’s loss in November.

The 2008 election has yet to have a Willie Horton or a Swift Boat moment, but the chances are good that there will be one.  The Internet, 24-hour cable news, YouTube, and a fresh crop of front organizations have made negative techniques more potent. “There are so many more ways to communicate smears,” says presidential historian Richard Shenkman. “It’s all smear, all the time.”