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Dirty Politics – Part Three (cont.)

“The way guys like me view the world is through the ‘issue matrix box,” Raymond explains. He draws a box divided up into four quadrants that, he says, represent the four things campaigns are all about: 1) What I say about me, 2) What I say about my opponent, 3) What he says about himself, and 4) What my opponent says about me. This is all that matters, Raymond insists, and this is basically what drives opposition research.

Most research, Raymond adds, is pulling data from public records. “Opposition research is not going through people’s trash,” he says. “It’s tedious, awful work.  Often times, opposition research is about finding the mundane and finding whether it becomes salient in that matrix box.” Opposition research never sees the light of day, he notes, unless it’s poll-tested first. In research, you want to prompt a response from voters that’s totally predictable. Raymond says, “It’s about getting people to reveal their worst nature.”

Once the polls indicate what the hot-button issues are going to be, a campaign uses the research to craft a narrative, the “Al Gore is a liar” and “George Bush is an amiable dunce” story lines that lure voters into viewing the candidates through a predetermined prism. “It’s not so much about the truth as it is about the truth as I tell it to you,” Raymond says.

While campaigns often get blamed for digging up dirt on candidates, sometimes the dirt comes to them, and then they have to wrestle with how to make it public. Raymond says he once heard a lecture from the late Greg Stevens, a legendary GOP media consultant. Stevens worked for George H.W. Bush in 1988, and is responsible for making the famous ad of Michael Dukakis looking ridiculous driving around in a tank. Although the Dukakis campaign itself staged the event publicly, Raymond says that Stevens told the class that he had actually received the footage of Dukakis in the tank anonymously. It showed up in an envelope in his office, and it took some doing trying to figure out if they could actually use it.

Traditional opposition research also relies heavily on the mainstream media to give it credibility, so oftentimes the real dirt that campaigns turn up doesn’t get used largely because the media won’t touch it. The nastiest personal allegations are also rarely delivered from the campaigns themselves, but rather from outside groups that have taken on the job of the dirtier work.

How you get information is critical, says Raymond, because you can open yourself up to criminal charges. It’s also risky with the public, which can frown on nasty personal attacks that aren’t relevant to the election. That’s why despite its reputation, opposition research tends to be less looking for mistresses and more at questions like, “How much money do they get, why and from where?” Raymond says.

When the public thinks about candidates digging up dirt on each other, there’s always this sense that the campaigns have dispatched shadowy private investigators who snoop around for personal transgressions of their opponents. In fact, if political consultants are to be believed, very few campaigns anymore engage private investigators. Raymond says that, if it were done at all, a candidate would probably subcontract those services through a law firm so that the information doesn’t have to be publicly disclosed. The private investigators are hired to collect the information that isn’t in the public records, things like what the ex-wife has to say about a candidate, or how his former business partners feel about him. But seasoned opposition-research veterans say that private investigators usually don’t produce much, and that it’s safer to handle research from inside the campaign where controls are in place to keep people from crossing the line into the illegal.