The Guy behind the smear ads

[dtotire]

UNIVERSITY PLACE, Wash. — A Bible verse taped to a whiteboard in Floyd Brown’s office that he uses to track his efforts to attack Senator Barack Obama reads, “That is why for Christ’s sake I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”

Mr. Brown, 47, a 6-foot-6 bear of a man is perhaps best known for his involvement with the Willie Horton television advertisement that helped sink Michael S. Dukakis’s candidacy in 1988. Mr. Brown has had much in his career to be delighted about as the source of scores of conservative assaults on Democrats that have earned him their lasting enmity.
Mr. Brown is back to his trade of bludgeoning a Democratic candidate for president, producing an innuendo-laden advertisement that is being televised this week in Michigan, albeit sparsely on cable, questioning Mr. Obama’s religious background.
The Obama campaign singled out Mr. Brown on Thursday as emblematic of the threat that independent groups on the right posed to him. On Friday, Mr. Obama, at a news conference in Jacksonville, Fla., again named Mr. Brown while defending his campaign’s rejection of public financing for the general election.
Yet if Mr. Brown’s struggles are any indication — he has so far failed to raise much money — it is not clear that Republicans will be able to repeat their successes in 2004, when independent groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had a significant role in undermining Senator John Kerry’s campaign.
“It’s all about reaching a tipping point,” Mr. Brown said. “Swift Boats achieved the tipping point. I was part of a team that reached the tipping point in 1988. In 1992, we didn’t reach it. We might not this time. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try.”
No major independent effort to help Senator John McCain’s campaign has materialized. Although Republican operatives say something will eventually develop, alarm has spread among many, especially after Mr. Obama’s announcement on Thursday on public financing, raising the prospect that he will wield an enormous financial advantage over Mr. McCain in the fall.

More here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/us/politics/21ads.html?hp

[baldguy]

1. from Sourcewatch:

Brown is described as an "ultra-conservative" who "remains proud of the 1988 Willie Horton ad, widely denounced as racist pandering" by The Public Eye.<7> Brown is "perhaps best known as being one of the major architects, along with Lee Atwater, behind the infamous and racist Willie Horton ad that some credit to George H.W. Bush winning the presidency in 1988," Bryan Pfeifer wrote February 5, 2007, in The UWM Post, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student newspaper.<8>

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Floyd_G._Brown

[sakura]

2. "That is why for Christ’s sake I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions..."

How ironic. But he's probably misinterpreting that verse.