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Dirty
Tricks 101 This is what John F.Kennedy said about Richard Nixon:
Do you think Hillary's "3 AM" commercial at the top is "hardball politics" or "a dirty trick"? How about the one just below it? Personally, I don't know of any presidential year that has been free of "dirty tricks" - knowing, deliberate smears with information known to be false or can't be documented, timed in such a way as to blacken an opponent's reputation with career-wrecking charges just hours before a crucial vote to which that opponent does not have time to respond. The 2008 campaign, while not (yet) the worst, is still growing increasingly nasty. It can fairly be said that Hillary Clinton's campaign is so far, by far, the most vicious and nasty. But John McCain has yet to start throwing his hardest punches ... and even Barack Obama's campaign has been accused by Clinton of dirty tricks. It is difficult sometimes to separate "hardball politics" from "dirty tricks" because the line is fuzzy and subjective, depending on whether your candidate is the target or the aggressor. For example, while the now-famous "3 AM" Hillary commercial is fear-mongering, it does not fall into the class of "dirty tricks." It is a copy of the same ad first run by Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater, and a later one run by Walter Mondale. Negative? Very much so! But it worked. It may have worked so well because the Obama campaign wasn't fast enough on its feet to do any more than copy the same ad, with a slightly different ending - thus only reinforcing Hillary's original ad. Instead, they might have thought of using the footage from a Bill Clinton speech (third video down from the top), and run "one of the Clinton laws of politics". Also, it is important to separate "dirty tricks" from "flip-flops" and candidate dishonesty. The former is a deliberate attempt to destroy one's opponent, inflicting the most damage in the least amount of time. The latter is an attempt to cover one's own ass. Most, but not all, of the Clinton campaign smears have been against Barack Obama. Some have reportedly been against John Edwards, who dropped out of the race relatively early. First, understand the structure of a presidential campaign. I have worked in two of them, one as the Illinois state chairman of Senator Eugene McCarthy's 1968 campaign, the other as Davidson County co-chairman of John Anderson's campaign, both as a Republican and as an independent. There are three basic modules of a campaign organization:
On the campaign staff itself, there is iron-clad control from the top, usually the state chairman, who then reports to the national chairman or national committee. No one - I repeat, no one - is allowed to issue any press statements or send out any e-mails to the media on their own. Everything - I repeat, everything - must go through the proper channels. Advisors and consultants are their own people, usually following their own independent careers as experts in their own field. They are not allowed to make any independent statements outside the campaign about the campaign without the express approval of the campaign chairman ... and any such statements are usually written up by the state media or PR department, then signed off on by the consultant or advisor. The wording may be a hybrid of the advisor's own wording and that of the campaign itself. The job of an advisor is to provide advice to the campaign, privately and confidentially. The reason for both #1 and #2 is pretty simple: the campaign must speak with one voice, just as a corporation speaks with one voice. You simply can't have a dozen different people injecting their own comments, opinions, etc. into anything that goes to the public. A single misspoken word, or a word that can be misinterpreted, can wreck a campaign. While I didn't always agree with the final product, I certainly respected the principle and the reasons for such rules. In 1968 in Illinois, I was the who made those rules. Volunteers and supporters are the loose cannons on deck. You cannot control what they say or do. A campaign's job is to simply keep them (volunteers) busy at an assigned task. There is a rule that a volunteer must be assigned a task within 3-4 hours - or at the least the very same day. If you fail to do that, there is a perception that they're not wanted and they lose interest quickly. A campaign will most likely never see, meet or even be in contact with the vast majority of its supporters/contributors - simply citizens who support the candidacy. Officially, these supporters do not speak for the campaign, only for themselves, and a campaign must establish that rule clearly and early. Other than that, we can only cross our fingers, fold our hands and utter a quiet prayer that they don't make fools of both themselves and our candidate. For instance, here - on this website - I am speaking as a citizen, not as a staffer or an advisor. Even with these rules and expectations, things don't always go right.
That's the kind of thing that can go wrong at even the highest levels. Was it a "dirty trick"? I have no idea and no evidence that it was.
My point is that dirty tricks are very commonplace - and, worse, they work. They are not the same thing as "attack politics" or "hardball politics." In late-breaking news (as I write this), a perfect example has surfaced of the difficulty in controlling advisors and supporters who are outside the actual circle of "staffers." Samantha Power, an Obama adviser, has resigned after publicly calling Hillary Clinton "a monster." Dirty trick? No. Adviser blunder embarrassing to the campaign? Most definitely! |
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| In the beginning, I will be relying heavily on Google
search results as the basic sources, since it takes time to research
those sources, collect them and organize them and then examine them for
a more complete over-all picture. This will at least give you a good
place to start.
Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama
John McCain
Hillary Clinton & Dirty Tricks Barack Obama & Dirty Tricks
John McCain & Dirty Tricks
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