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Dirty Politics – Part Three

An operative’s tour of opposition research

Allen Raymond knows a thing or two about dirty politics.

At 41, Raymond has spent most of his career working deep inside Republican politics. He was once the head of opposition research for the New Jersey Republican Party, and as he worked his way up the food-chain of electoral politics, he went on to become chief of staff to a co-chairman of the Republican National Committee. He did a stint in presidential elections working for Steve Forbes’s presidential campaign in 2000, and after Forbes lost, Raymond became the executive director of the Republican Leadership Council, a political action committee with several U.S. senators on its board. He also ventured into business for himself, setting up a GOP phone-bank business with seed money from his mentor, uber-lobbyist and now Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, and Barbour’s partner, Ed Rogers.

In 2002, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, James Treffinger, hired Raymond’s phone-bank company, GOP Marketplace. Its assignment: to call voters on Super Bowl Sunday, in the middle of what turned out to be a tight game, attacking one of Treffinger’s primary rivals on abortion. The calls appeared to come from yet another opponent, effectively allowing Treffinger to smear one candidate while making voters mad at another for interrupting them during the game. (Treffinger ended up going to jail on mail fraud and obstruction of justice charges from an unrelated corruption case.) Prosecutors interviewed Raymond about the Super Bowl calls but did not bring any charges.

Raymond’s dirty tricks eventually did land him in jail for three months in 2006, thanks to his role in another case during the 2002 Senate races. Working for the New Hampshire Republican Party, Raymond hired an Idaho telemarketing firm to use repeated calls that immediately disconnected to tie up a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote phone bank on Election Day. In 2006, he served a three-month sentence for conspiring to engage in interstate telephone communication with the intent to harass or annoy.

These are two of the more vivid recent examples of political dirty tricks. While not always illegal, dirty tricks have become a staple of political campaigns.  They don’t cost much, and they can be devastating — if they don’t backfire and lead their practitioners to prison.  They’re also what give opposition research a bad name, as research and dirty tricks often become synonymous, when in fact they are very different animals.

In itself, there’s nothing wrong with conducting opposition research. The process helps voters distinguish among the candidates by highlighting their records and various (and occasionally evolving) stands on the issues. The problem with opposition research isn’t the fact that it’s collected, but when it’s disseminated in dirty ways.

Because voters frown on negative campaigning (even as they respond to it), candidates work hard to distance themselves from the most virulent attacks on their opponents. As such, these dirty wars are usually waged by front groups that give the candidates plausible deniability when they become public. They rely on the standard tools of leaks to the media and traditional TV advertising, and technology has increasingly made the smear-delivery system more diffuse, less transparent, and in many cases, more lethal. 

Since coming out of jail, Raymond has left politics (“I can’t even vote,” he says). But his bird’s-eye view has given him a unique perspective on the way campaigns operate. He has also shared this perspective in a book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, published earlier this year, and in recent testimony before a congressional panel.

“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.