RSS Feed MenuPolitico reports that donors to the Club for Growth have released an ad “Progressives for Scozzafava” in NY-23 that praises the Republican candidate as the best choice for left-wing voters.
While the points made in the ad are accurate and substantial, the ad’s self-presentation is deceptive. The ad’s donors created a front group to sponsor the ad in order to conceal the ad’s true sponsorship.
Faking campaign materials can be a crime. Nixon campaign aide Donald Segretti went to prison for forging a letter falsely ascribed to Democratic candidate Ed Muskie. The “Progressives for Scozzafava” ad stays inside the law, but surely counts as a dirty trick.
Do such tricks work? Often enough. A former Republican operative named Allen Raymond literally wrote the book on them.
(After he too went to jail for jamming Democratic phone lines in the 2002 off-year election in New Hampshire.) Newsweek ran an interview with Raymond last year:
Say you were targeting evangelical voters in Iowa. You might say, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for a candidate whose faith states that the devil and Jesus are brothers [trying to cast Mormonism in a bad light and tarnishing Romney in the process]?” You know how the voter is going to respond. They are going to have a negative response to that question. You are linking the question to a certain candidate, aiming to leave a certain impression—generally a negative impression. …
[Or] You might mail an immigration piece—a piece that says [in the name of a Democrat], “I’m the candidate for tougher immigration laws,” with a picture of someone climbing through the border fence. Then you might send that piece of mail to a household with a Puerto Rican surname. The purpose of that is to incite that household that might otherwise vote Democratic on that issue.
The political science literature suggests that these kinds of tricks work, especially if they are close to election day. On the other hand … they don’t usually get exposed until after the election day. The trick in NY-23 has unraveled unusually fast. Will Hoffman pay a price for it on election day?
ottovbvs // Oct 30, 2009 at 6:25 pm
31 ireign // Oct 30, 2009 at 3:46 pm
……Our 200k earning Republican operative gives his take on reality.
ottovbvs // Oct 30, 2009 at 6:41 pm
31 ireign // Oct 30, 2009 at 3:46 pm
“ottoBS keep digging a bigger hole”
……..irreign I know you are rather self concious about the university you went to and maybe it’s justified since they didn’t appear to give you too good a grounding in the English language and that words often have multiple meanings. For your info here is Wiki’s definition of:
“Country”
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“‘In geography, a country is a geographical region. The term is often applied to a political division or the territory of a state, or to a smaller, or former, political division of a geographical region.” government.”
……..How long have I got to go on providing remedial education for you?