The Atlantic: Playing Dirty

[Larkspur]

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/06/green.htm

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Political campaigns always attempt to diminish their opponents, of course. What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls "votes and quotes"—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival's legislative record and public statements. Comstock's taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton's top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. "The team we had from 2000," she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, "were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys."

Comstock combined a prosecutor's mentality with an investigator's ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative "storyline" about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. "A campaign is a lot like a trial," Comstock explained. "You want people aggressively arguing their case."

Maligning an opponent, even with his own words and deeds, is a tricky business; voters take a dim view of "negative" politics, and are liable to punish the campaign carrying out the attacks rather than the intended target. Digging the Dirt provides a rare glimpse of how political operatives have learned to use the media to get around this problem, by creating a journalistic black market for damaging stories. During the first debate between Gore and Bush, in October of 2000, the BBC crew stationed itself inside the RNC's war room, filming researchers as they operated with the manic intensity of day traders, combing through every one of Gore's statements for possible misstatements or exaggerations. The researchers discovered two (Gore erroneously claimed never to have questioned Bush's experience, and to have accompanied a federal official to the site of a Texas disaster), and immediately Tim Griffin tipped off the Associated Press. Soon the filmmakers would catch the team exulting as the AP took the story.
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[Larkspur]

1. And Clark's "dirty tricks" against Dean are unveiled in this article too

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Democrats may not have been successful using research against Bush, but they have fared much better deploying it against each other. One prominent Democrat has already fallen victim this year—though the attack was orchestrated within his own party. By last fall Howard Dean had achieved the unlikely status of front-runner in the crowded race for the Democratic nomination. Yet for all his popularity, the public knew little about him. He had built a following almost overnight, mainly because of his strident opposition to the Iraq War and a visceral anger toward the Bush Administration that other candidates were thought to lack. By the time Gore endorsed him, on December 9, Dean's victory in the upcoming primaries seemed assured.

That same week Ben Holzer, the research director for General Wesley Clark's campaign, arrived with Lehane, who was then working for Clark, in Washington, D.C., for a series of visits to the major television networks, newspapers, and newsmagazines. They toted a three-ring binder that contributed as much as anything else to Dean's rapid demise. The Clark campaign had classified the stories in it as singles, doubles, triples, or home runs, based on the damage they were expected to inflict. Holzer and Lehane offered producers and reporters exclusives on many of these stories with the proviso that if they were not used quickly, they would be handed to a rival. In the hypercompetitive world of political journalism this pretty much guaranteed swift airing or publication.

Gore's surprise endorsement marked the Dean campaign's high point. Six days later, on December 15, Dean declared with typical candor that the capture of Saddam Hussein "has not made America safer"—a comment that stirred public doubts about his fitness for the presidency and also about his increasingly visible hotheadedness and frequent gaffes. Against this growing uncertainty the Clark campaign set off a barrage of stories portraying Dean as hypocritical, dishonest, and incompetent. According to interviews with reporters, producers, and campaign staffers, these are some of them. (Lehane and Holzer, citing promises of confidentiality to reporters and producers, would neither confirm nor deny that these stories originated with the campaign.)
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[havocmom]

2. couldn't "use the media" to the extent it has been done since 2000

without the media's compliance. The 'fourth estate' got bought up by corporate interests and had the 'news departments' gutted to make them ' profitable' starting back in the 80s. We saw the fruits of that program with the coranation of bush*, their puppet/poster boy, in the 2000 selection.