As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Dirty Tricks In California
We've heard some scattered stories today. As dkirk notes in comments on the last thread, Yes on 8 is apparently using Barack Obama's voice in a robocall:
Male Voice: Here are Barack Obama's own words on Gay Marriage. --Then play recording of Obama response to question during debates--.
Male Voice:(Paraphrased) - Proposition 8 defines marriage as between one man and one woman, as you heard Barack Obama state. Remember to vote Yes on Prop 8.
Obama has repeatedly announced his opposition to Prop. 8. I don't really like his splitting of the baby, that he personally opposes same-sex marriage but opposes divisive and discriminatory initiatives like Prop. 8, but let it be known that it's the furthest any Presidential candidate has been willing to go in American history, particularly the fact that he has lent his image to ads.
This is a message for (um) all people (um) in Pasadena. The (um) place for (uh) people in Pasadena is for you to vote at Jackie Robinson on Wednesday the 5th, November 5th. The (uh) ballot can be delivered on November 5th at Jackie Robinson.
Today is November 4th.
There's audio at the link. I'm bet you dollars to donuts that this comes from Yes on 8. Just a hunch. Pasadena is a pretty liberal city, and huge turnout obviously could be the difference in a lot of these races.
The biggest newspaper in the region, the Sacramento Bee, makes the case for Charlie Brown and a new direction in the district, particularly on the area of putting pragmatism above ideology. Now, I don't totally agree with all the conclusions of the editorial, but the last bit is unquestionably true:
Brown understands that the that the mortgage crisis, the collapse of the financial system, the credit crunch and the recession are real. He would have supported the rescue plan because doing nothing was worse than doing something, though he believes Congress has done a poor job of selling the package. And the final package assured taxpayers get any profits, required congressional oversight, banned golden parachutes.
This is telling. McClintock sticks to ideology; Brown pragmatically puts the nation first.
The nation and the 4th District need to find ways out of partisan and ideological gridlock. Elect Charlie Brown to Congress.
Now, if the final package wasn't such a dog with fleas that the feds have basically scrapped it, and if the banks weren't using it to collect free money instead of facilitating lending, this would be a stronger argument. Whatever; the Bee's endorsements have been profoundly odd, and have seemed to value bipartisan seriousness over everything. But I think there's a difference between rejecting partisanship and abandoning core principles. I think that Charlie Brown will govern the way he has campaigned, by working through problems and using his best judgment based on his values and principles. Tom McClintock is incapable of adapting to changing information whatsoever.
What he will do is try to play dirty to win the election, including sending nasty robocalls throughout the district because they're cheap for his cash-strapped campaign. The problem is that they haven't done a good job of checking their call lists. The Brown campaign, for example, got robocalled.
UPDATE: The latest poll shows Brown expanding his slim but measurable lead.
Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 10/20-22. Likely voters. MoE 5% (9/23-25 results)
McClintock (R) 42 (41) Brown (D) 48 (46)
Among early voters (13 percent of respondents)
McClintock (R) 38 Brown (D) 56
Brown takes independents 51-34. McClintock's fav/unfav is at 44/42. Brown is at 49/29. And McClintock is out of the cash he'd need to push up Brown's unfavorables.
This is very good news. Let's get this seat. Stay for Change.
CA Campaign Update: CA-03, CA-04, CA-46, Assembly & Senate
Here's some tidbits from the campaign trail with 12 days out:
• CA-03: Bill Durston and Dan Lungren debated last night, and it was a predictable affair, says Randy Bayne:
Nothing new, no fireworks, no knockout punch, no excitement of any kind was reported by either MyMotherLode.com or the Stockton Record. Just what we already know — Durston wants us out of Iraq, doesn’t like No Child Left Behind, and thinks the bailout is the wrong solution. Lungren supports the occupation, favors No Child Left Behind, and voted for the bailout.
If you’re looking for change from eight years of down the toilet policy, and you don’t want to continue flushing our future down the crapper – vote for Bill Durston.
If the registration stats cited by anecdotal reports are at all accurate, we're going to be very close to registration parity in this seat by Election Day. Lungren may be acting positive in public, but inside the campaign they must be terrified. They probably didn't expect Durston to run a credible campaign.
"Lincoln asked, 'If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? The answer is four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one,'" McClintock said in a statement. "And calling a homosexual partnership a marriage doesn’t make it one."
I'm pretty sure that means nothing at all, but California's Alan Keyes has had to distance himself from the comment. Meanwhile his much bigger problem is lacking the funds to run a proper campaign. He's now taken to relying on cheap robocalls, and Charlie Brown has immediately called on him to stop. Dirty trick robocalls that appeared to be coming from the Brown campaign were a major factor in John Doolittle's narrow re-election in 2006.
• CA-46: I didn't get a chance to post Debbie Cook's amazing closing statement at Tuesday's debate. Here it is.
The OC Register has a story on this race today. These "Challenger hopes to upset incumbent" stories have a familiar feel to them - the pose of surprise that the race is competitive, the quote from the shallow CW fountain like Allen Hoffenblum explaining why the incumbent is probably still safe, and the overall sense of shock, which would be natural if you weren't paying attention for the last 18 months, like, um, us.
• Assembly & Senate: Art Torres and Ron Nehring had a debate yesterday, and I think Torres needed to be prepped a little better. He claimed that Democrats could grab a 2/3 majority in the legislature but then couldn't come up with a simple list of what seats are in play. He should be reading more Calitics. Nehring replied with a lot of bunk and a little truth.
None of that adds up to 54 and 27, of course, and Nehring said Torres' boast "just doesn't pencil out."
He noted that Democratic efforts to oust Sen. Jeff Denham via recall failed miserably this year and the party ended up with no opponent to challenge Sen. Abel Maldonado in Santa Maria, a district believed to be winnable by a Democrat.
On the Assembly side, Nehring said, Republicans "have a great shot at holding on to" the 15th and "have a number of strategic advantages in the 78th (because) the Democrats have nominated the most liberal candidate (Marty Block) they possibly could."
In the 80th, the Democratic candidate (Manuel Perez) "is getting hammered on ... social issues which are important to many people in the Latino community," Nehring said.
"I don't know how can you be serious about trying to have a two-thirds vote in the Legislature," Nehring told Torres, "when you blow so many of these opportunities."
I'll go bottom to top on this. Manuel Perez is going to CRUSH Gary Jeandron, and if anyone's being hammered, it's the Republicans. The IE money is pretty one-sided in the state. Between that and the registration gains, it'll take more than just spin to dig your party out of its self-created hole, Mr. Nehring.
However, on one point I will agree with you. The Denham recall and Maldonado disaster have indeed stopped the potential forward momentum in the Senate. Of course, Torres couldn't say the plain truth - that Don Perata is among the worst leaders in recent Democratic Party history, and has completely set back the state in major ways by his blunders. He is an embarrassment.
Chaylee Cole, a student at Fairmont State University, lost her part-time job in Weston last Friday after refusing to make telephone calls attacking Barack Obama.
McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee were paying for the calls, according to a "work paper" handed to Cole and her co-workers at the Weston offices of 1.2.1 Direct Response, a company based in Philadelphia.
"I was working at the call center," Cole said. "We got a campaign ad talking about how Obama had been part of terrorist attacks on the Capitol, the Pentagon and a judge's home and had ties with Bill Ayers.
"Last Thursday, I told them I did not want to read it," Cole said. "They said, 'Either you read it or you go home.'
"I told them I wasn't going to read it. They made me go home without pay for the rest of the day."
The most notable part of this, actually, is that McCain's hiring phone callers. The Obama campaign is entirely volunteer-driven.
There are also the robocalls, of course. And in the latest, Rudy Giuliani makes an appearance (as if his Presidential campaign didn't sap every ounce of his credibility) claiming that Barack Obama opposes jail time for murderers.
Hi, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I'm calling for John McCain and the Republican National Committee because you need to know that Barack Obama opposes mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers.
It's true, I read Obama's words myself. And recently, Congressional liberals introduced a bill to eliminate mandatory prison sentences for violent criminals -- trying to give liberal judges the power to decide whether criminals are sent to jail or set free. With priorities like these, we just can't trust the inexperience and judgment of Barack Obama and his liberal allies. This call was paid for by the Republican National Committee and McCain-Palin 2008 at 866 558 5591.
He opposes mandatory minimum sentences, and I think only in nonviolent cases. That's been spun out to "the blacks will be roaming the streets and out of jail free!"
Know the facts: Call 641-715-3900 ext. 83682 Then please fwd this 2 your phonebook they need 2 know. You will Lose your freedoms this November 4th if you don't know!!!!
The phone number leads to the Bill Ayers robocall. It's reverse smearing!
I guess when human beings not named Rudy Giuliani won't do your dirty work, you have to bring the callers to you instead of going to the callers.
Pathetic.
UPDATE: There are now four Republican Senators on the record denouncing these robocalls and asking them to stop in their home states. Talk about a FAIL.
I think it's kind of stupid to invest in mass robocalls. I don't think they're nearly as effective as a human being, and while they're a good way to sneak in a negative attack, I'm not sure people invest a lot of credibility in a recorded voice. Certainly the anecdotalreaction to the highly negative calls coming from the McCain campaign in recent days suggest that they are backfiring. Worse, the dishonorable McCain hired exactly the same organization to make these robocalls that slimed him in South Carolina in 2000.
Well, it turns out FLS, which has offices in Phoenix and St. Paul, is basically the same outfit that George W. Bush hired to robo-slime McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary, something that McCain repeatedly denounced with great outrage.
In 2000, the Washington Post reported that the Bush team's phone operation was conducted by a firm called Feathers, Hodges, Larson and Synhorst. A press release in 2003 (via Nexis) indicates that this firm had by then become Feathers, Larson and Synhorst, or FLS for short.
On February 20, 2000, McCain thundered that the robocalls hitting him -- done by this outfit -- were "hate calls" that had "inundated" him. Now, if Schoff is right, McCain appears to have enlisted the same outfit for his robo-slime campaign.
How perfect! No one could have made this one up if they'd tried.
But I just think they aren't effective. They're a band-aid for an inferior volunteer organization with little chance of matching Sen. Obama in voter contacts. That should frighten Republican stalwarts.
WALLACE: But Senator, back — if I may, back in 2000 when you were the target of robo calls, you called these hate calls and you said...
MCCAIN: They worked.
WALLACE: ... and you said the following, "I promise you, I have never and will never have anything to do with that kind of political tactic."
Now you've hired the same guy who did the robo calls against you to — reportedly, to do the robo calls against Obama and the Republican Senator Susan Collins, the co-chair of your campaign in Maine, has asked you to stop the robo calls. Will you do that?
MCCAIN: Of course not. These are legitimate and truthful, and they are far different than the phone calls that were made about my family and about certain aspects that — things that this is — this is dramatically different, and either you haven't — didn't see those things in 2000...
WALLACE: No, I saw them.
MCCAIN: ... or you don't know the difference between that and what is a legitimate issue, and that is Senator Obama being truthful with the American people.
He's going to have to live with himself after this election is over. But let's face it- he's lying about this. The call has nothing to do with Obama being truthful about Bill Ayers. It asserts that Obama and Ayers were basically good friends. Others insinuate similar garbage. He's lying. He knows he's lying. And he has no honor.
As for the whining that Obama's raising too much money and it's going to lead to a scandal, you mean like using a front group for lying about your opponent?
Robocalls are cheaper and less labor-intensive than having volunteers man phonebanks. They are also more controllable in terms of message - what you want to communicate to the voter is communicated, every single time.
They're also extremely annoying, ask anyone who's been on the receiving end of them. And they are typically used to deliver the ugliest messages of a campaign.
A harsh new robocall (above) — at least the third in a series — attacks Obama for having "worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers" whose group "killed Americans."
The script:
"Hello. I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the judgment to lead our country. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee at 202-863-8500."
They're not even trying to hide this. The McCain campaign and the RNC are explicitly paying for these, not some front group.
I'm calling on behalf of John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama and his Democrat allies in the Illinois Senate opposed a bill requiring doctors to care for babies born alive after surviving attempted abortions -- a position at odds even with John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama and his liberal Democrats are too extreme for America. Please vote -- vote for the candidates who share our values. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee at 202 863 8500.
If Barack had only agreed to town hall meetings, this could have all been avoided!
I mean, this is the obvious manner for what's left of McCain's message. Angry candidate, angry robocalls. But I should note that in 2006, when the Republicans flooded Democratic voters with waves of spoof robocalls meant to seem like Democrats were sending them, one lawmaker stood up and demanded action. He introduced legislation called the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2006 which would have prevented this type of nonsense.
I appreciate the goal of Women's Voices, Women's Vote, an effort to mobilize young women (the largest voting bloc that Democrats need to get to the polls regularly). But if this is true, that they've been putting out deceptive robo-calls in primary states which have the effect of depressing turnout and disenfranchising voters, that's really not good.
First, a quick recap: As we covered yesterday, N.C. residents have reported receiving peculiar automated calls from someone claiming to be "Lamont Williams." The caller says that a "voter registration packet" is coming in the mail, and the recipient can sign it and mail it back to be registered to vote. No other information is provided.
The call is deceptive because the deadline has already passed for mail-in registrations for North Carolina's May 6 primary. Also, many who have received the calls -- like Kevin Farmer in Durham, who made a tape of the call that is available here -- are already registered. The call's suggestion that they're not registered has caused widespread confusion and drawn hundreds of complaints, including many from African-American voters who received the calls.
The calls are also probably illegal. Farmer and others have told Facing South the calls use a blocked phone number and provided no contact information -- a violation of North Carolina rules regulating "robo-calls" (N.C. General Statute 163-104(b)(1)c). N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper further stated in a recent memo that the identifying information must be clear enough to allow the recipient to "complain or seek redress" -- something not included in the calls.
The same calls have gone out in Virginia and elsewhere during the primary season. For their part Page Gardner at WVWV responded to the controversy, and while it's noble to put resources into voter registration drives, doing it during an ongoing primary when the deadline has already passed, and framing it in such a way to sow confusion, is really awful.
I don't know where this is going, but one thing I'll say for sure - people need to lay off Digby. She was picked by WVWV in an online poll as their favorite blogger, and she appeared in a WVWV commercial a year ago. That's the sum total of her "coordination" with this group, and to impugn her motives is ridiculous. She has more character and integrity than anyone I know, and I'm proud to call her a friend. Anyone that wants to give her a bunch of crap for this needs to go through me.
I should have added that robocalls, in addition to mailers, are where the dirtiest attacks are typically dumped in a campaign. And I really hope that the Clinton campaign isn't resorting to tactics favored by clueless racists, but Harold Meyerson (not given to irrational exuberance) reports this:
I was visiting a friend in Los Angeles this morning when what I would describe as a dirty trick intruded upon us. My friend, I should say, is a notable political figure in L.A. who lives in a very upscale neighborhood -- one in which few African Americans reside -- and is a Clinton supporter (he greeted me holding a Hillary lawn sign).
We were sitting in his kitchen when the phone rang. He answered it and looked startled. On the line, he said the moment he hung up, was a high-decibel gentleman with a very exaggerated, old style -- Amos 'n Andy, in fact -- black pattern of speech, singing the praises of Barack Obama. When I lived in L.A., I occasionally got calls that purported to be from one campaign but were actually from another, presumably pitched to the leading ethnic group in my neighborhood (Jewish), but calculated to inflame Jews against the candidate the caller claimed to support. Looks like the same thing is happening now in selected neighborhoods.
The Clinton campaign has denied this trick, which is fine. They shouldn't even think about dragging this campaign back to the depths after last night's heights. I would say that robocalls are notoriously hard to source and so finding the truth is nearly impossible here. But I do know that negative campaigning exists and that's just a fact.
"Mitt Romney thinks he can fool us. He supported abortion on demand, even allowed a law mandating taxpayer-funding for abortion. He says he changed his mind, but he still hasn’t changed the law. He told gay organizers in Massachusetts he would be a stronger advocate for special rights than even Ted Kennedy. Now, it’s something different.
Look, McCain knows what he's doing. He saw how dirty attacks propelled George W. Bush to victory in South Carolina in 2000, and he's following that path.
It's unquestionably true that the same South Carolina dirty tricksters who stopped John McCain's Presidential bid in 2000 are out this year. The latest revelation is that Mike Huckabee's army of robo-callers and push-pollers are spreading that McCain supports experiments on unborn children. Actually, Huckabee's outfit is push-polling all his Republican rivals in the state. There is one charge specific to McCain, however: a mailer from a group called "Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain. It's pretty weak stuff, accusing McCain of collaborating with his captors. Only thing is, the mailer wasn't mailed anywhere.
Recently, the group sent a mailer to approximately 80 newspaper editors in South Carolina accusing McCain of selling out his fellow POWs in Vietnam. On Tuesday, the McCain campaign (which is working hard to appeal to vet voters) made one of McCain's former fellow POWs available to the media to respond to the smear. The story, picked up by the AP and Wall Street Journal among others, got national play -- undoubtedly more play than the group would have been able to get on its own.
I spoke to the founder of Vietnam Veterans against John McCain, Jerry Kiley, yesterday. He told me that the group hasn't "actively sought donations at this point," and that the next step for the group will be mailings "going out to our network," with the intention that the mailing would then be forwarded on to local media there. The group just doesn't have the funds to send mailings directly to voters -- nor, as they declared they would in their statement of purpose, to run radio and TV ads. Things "could change," he told me, "if we received a sizable donation," but he wasn't holding out much hope.
Instead, they're planning "an email campaign." Groups of like-minded vets throughout the country will get the email chain started, he said, "so it will spread very quickly throughout the country."
So, this is an unfunded group trying to get some media attention. The McCain campaign went nuclear on it, to "prove" that groups are out to get him in South Carolina. I have to say that this is NOTHING compared to what Rove and the boys did to McCain in South Carolina last time. That was an establishment attack. These are a few guys with a flyer and some time on their hands. The question is, does McCain run the risk of over-publicizing this smear to the extent of it actually rebounding back on him?
"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
This is a guy who's telling you that the Bible will be his Constitution. People tell you who they are. And this is why young evangelicals are flocking to him, as opposed to the evangelical leadership which is really more concerned with keeping power than anything the living God has to say. Huckabee represents a movement to quite literally take back the nation for Christ. I wonder, however, if he missed the memo on the commandment that says "Thou shalt not bear false witness":
I got a call from Huck's "independent" push pollers [Friday night]. It was a robo-call with a script that was micro-targeted for my Democratic union household. The robo-voice, which asked "poll" questions and left me time to answer, was an African-American male voice. Wanted to know if I was aware that "there is no real choice in the Michigan Democratic primary this year" and encouraged me to vote in the Repub primary instead.
Also asked if I was aware that the Machinists Union had endorsed Huckabee "for the first time in history..." (I assume by tonite they will add the Painters, too.) And if I knew that Huckabee was a fighter for working families, etc.
At the end, the robo-voice said the poll "was not affiliated with or authorized by any candidate or committee," but all the "questions" were designed to communicate positive information about the Huckster.
It's a classic ploy for these types of calls to play on ethnic and racial stereotypes -- though in this instance, the pollsters seem to have chosen their voice with the idea that a typically African-American male voice would appeal to Democrats. (When I asked Common Sense Issues' executive director Rick Davis whether it was accurate to characterize the voice in these calls as "an African-American male voice," he said "it could be.") Former dirty trickster Allen Raymond writes in his book How to Rig An Election that he had an array of actors available to portray a range of stereotypes, including "angry black man," which was deployed to frighten middle-class whites.
Huck's boys even called Republican Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, which was probably a bad idea.
I'm sure the Christian leader can reconcile dishonest push polling and robocalling in some way. Maybe Jesus worked phone banks!
Kuhn: I don’t know to what extent you have been briefed or been able to take a look at the NIE report that came out yesterday ...
Huckabee: I’m sorry?
Kuhn: The NIE report, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Have you been briefed or been able to take a look at it —
Huckabee: No.
Kuhn: Have you heard of the finding?
Huckabee: No.
OK, a guy's out campaigning all day, maybe he doesn't pick up on the breaking news. But nobody from his communications staff prepares him for an on-the-record interview? They don't think that, you know, CURRENT EVENTS might come up?
Kuhn: I don’t know to what extent you have been briefed or been able to take a look at the NIE report that came out yesterday ...
Huckabee: I’m sorry?
Kuhn: The NIE report, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Have you been briefed or been able to take a look at it —
Huckabee: No.
Kuhn: Have you heard of the finding?
Huckabee: No.
OK, a guy's out campaigning all day, maybe he doesn't pick up on the breaking news. But nobody from his communications staff prepares him for an on-the-record interview? They don't think that, you know, CURRENT EVENTS might come up?
UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune has a story on this, as well as The Hotline. This is not going to be pretty.
"I don't know where the intelligence is coming from that says that they suspended the program and how credible that is versus the news that they actually are expanding it," he said. "And then I've heard the last two weeks supposed reports that say that they are accelerating and could be having a reactor in a much shorter period of time than originally they thought."
"I don't know where these boys with their newfangled machinery and techno-wizardry get off saying Iran doesn't have a n- CIA? What's that, a new pro cockfighting league? 16 intelligence agencies? Get out of town. Far as I know, we only got one higher intelligence, and that's the good Lord Jesus Christ!"
Ernie Fletcher is going to lose his governor's seat in Kentucky today. He's a hopelessly corrupt Republican, and Steve Beshear is a decent Democrat. The country is changing and they will not stand for a governor who has to pardon most of his top staff to keep them out of jail.
In attempting to save the election, Fletcher is returning to the last refuge of a scoundrel - calling Beshear a queer lover.
Someone in Kentucky has resorted to an almost certainly illegal campaign tactic in today's election for governor. A new robocall has gone out purporting to be from Fairness.org — the Web site of the Fairness Campaign, an actual gay rights organization in Kentucky — speaking with pride about the strong support of "the homosexual lobby" for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Steve Beshear.
"Beshear is receiving major support from out-of-state gay activists and has publicly committed to same-gender relationships," the man on the call says.
The Fairness Campaign has denied any part in the calls, and is urging people who have received the calls to report it to the authorities.
That is all they've got left. Republicans who have proven that they can't govern can only demagogue on hate. It's not going to work today. This is not only illegal, it's craven.
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