The Schalter

Written by: Dan Shires

It’s something we’ve never done too well in this country. You can look to the Saatchi ‘Demon Eyes’ campaign levelled at Tony Blair, but really, when it comes to opponent smearing, I don’t think we have the national heart for it. Our parties can ‘go negative’ on policy with the best of them (the 1979 campaign - also Saatchi - for Margaret Thatcher with the infamous ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster dealt a huge blow to an already tottering Labour government), but when personal attacks are levelled, all of us seem to collectively suck through our teeth at the sheer unsportsmanlike conduct of the whole thing.

Not so the Americans, and in this crucial election year, it’s worth taking a look back at the grand art of ratfucking - smearing your opponent by any means possible - as a true American tradition.

It’s a relatively new term, but an old tactic. Thomas Jefferson had no qualms about employing a journalist, James Callendar, to produce pamphlets which slandered his opponent, Alexander Hamilton. Conversely, Hamilton tried the same tactics with another political rival, Vice President Aaron Burr, in the 1800 election. This mendacity ended particularly harshly - Burr shot and killed Hamilton in a duel defending his honour from one of Hamilton’s political attacks. Imagine that today: A Vice President shooting someone down. Oh, wait…

Burr fucks up Hamilton good

So, political slander is hardly a new development in US political life. But it’s really in the modern age - where modern media plays an enormous part - that it has become an art form, and we can really look to Watergate to see it enacted to the full.

The term itself was revealed in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All The President’s Men by Donald Segretti. Segretti was a Campaign Political Operative for the wonderfully acronymed Committee to Re-Elect the President: CREEP. The man CREEP were seeking re-election for was, deliciously, Richard M Nixon. CREEP membership reads like a role-call of political infamy: Jon Mitchell, Jeb Magruder, G. Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt… all to be implicated in the Watergate scandal; Hunt and Liddy actually indicted for conspiracy.

Donald Segretti

But that was 1972. CREEP in 1971 was a Republican dirty tricks machine, and Segretti, already a veteran ratfucker from his student politics days at the University of Southern California found himself in the thick of it. He’d entered real political life in a roundabout way. He took a job with an ad agency, with a little help from Dwight Chapin. Chapin was tight with a senior exec at the company, H R Haldeman, who by 1968 was Nixon’s Chief Of Staff. Chapin, who had taken a job as Special Assistant to the President (Chief Ratfucker, if you will) then co-opted Segretti to head up a covert dirty tricks campaign in Wisconsin, to foster as much disunity within the local Democratic party as possible, by smear campaigns and planting spies in the Democratic offices.

His big break, as it were, came in the run-up to the 1972 Presidential election. Nixon was running scared from his main rival at the time, Senator Edmund Muskie, and Segretti was set to work ‘going negative’. He was relentless. Letters to the press alleged that Muskie had made some awful remarks about French Canadians. Then the same paper alleged that his wife was a drunk, who shouted her mouth off at campaign events. This charge forced Muskie to make an emotional public defence of his wife - at one point breaking down in tears and thus fostering the image that he wasn’t presidential material.

Then Segretti managed to get his hands on 300 sheets of Muskie’s office stationery, and sent out fraudulent letters to supporters of his Democratic contenders, Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey, alleging Jackson was a homosexual and Humphrey frequented prostitutes. The intent was to make it look like Muskie was a smear campaigner and it worked: Muskie’s credibility was shot to pieces and the nomination slipped from his grasp, as it did from the grasp of Humpreys and Jackson, leaving the field open for the candidate Nixon wanted to run against, George McGovern.

All this would have remained in the dark, were it not for the Watergate burglars being caught in the act - an event which led to the uncovering of the nefarious actions of CREEP across the whole political landscape, from dirty tricks to illegal wiretaps in the Democratic offices. In Woodward and Bernstein’s investigations, Segretti was discovered to have led similar campaigns against not just Muskie, Jackson and Humphreys, but also Ted Kennedy and eventual nominee McGovern (who Nixon regularly denounced as the candidate of “acid, amnesty and abortion”). Segretti was convicted of producing faked documents and distributing illegal campaign literature. His 4 months in prison didn’t hurt nearly as much as losing his licence to practise law.

The entire Watergate scandal is so convoluted, it can’t possibly be done justice here (and if you don’t know much about it, do yourself a massive favour and watch All The President’s Men) but there was one protégé of Segretti eminently worthy of note. This protégé had managed to pull the official stationery theft trick in 1970. He managed to steal 1000 sheets of headed paper from the office of Alan Dixon, running for State Treasurer of Illinois. With these he printed up fake flyers for Dixon rallies, advertising “free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing” and then handed them out at student fraternities and homeless shelters. The rallies, naturally, were disasters for Dixon. His campaign won out in the end, but he’d been well and truly ratfucked.

And who was this protégé?

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr Karl Rove. King Ratfucker.

Karl Rove and friend

Nicknamed ‘Bush’s Brain’, Rove has been a campaign strategist for the Republicans since the 70s, and is credited with being the architect of the George W Bush administration up to his resignation in 2007, and one of the most prominent figures in the Neoconservative movement. He’s also brilliant at distancing himself from ratfucking, so I’d best tread carefully and use the word ‘allegedly’ a lot.

It was his involvement in the 1972 Presidential election that formed one of Roves ‘themes’ - he allegedly managed to portray George McGovern as a left wing peacenik, even though he had an unblemished record as a World War Two B-24 pilot. In the 2004 election, John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran and holder of numerous Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for bravery, was painted as a coward and a traitor by the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth organisation, a supposedly ‘independent’ group who, it was seriously alleged, took direction from Rove. The swiftboating of Kerry was an absolute body blow, from which his campaign never truly recovered.

One of his most effective weapons was the push poll: a most-times automated phone system that rings you up and asks quite unbelievably loaded questions to fix a falsehood in the mind of undecided voters. When running for Governor of Texas in 1996, against incumbent Democratic Governor Ann Richards, Bush had Rove as an advisor - of a $600,000 campaign spend, well over $300,000 went to Rove’s consultancy firm. A push poll at the time asked if voters would be “more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians?”

When Bush ran against John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2000 elections, a push poll occurred which asked, “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” McCain, of course, had done no such thing (he and his wife had, in fact, adopted a Bangladeshi child) but ratfucking is all about seeing how much mud sticks. James Moore and Wayne Slater ‘s book, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential alleges that Rove’s involvement was key, and that such tricks went to the upper echelons of the Republican campaign team, and subsequent administration.

He excelled at straw man arguments which broach no analysis, but instead simply fix polarised opinions in the mind of the electorate. In the lead up to the Iraq invasion, it was Rove’s tactics which conflated 9/11 to Iraq, even though there was provably no link between the two. Rove famously said in 2005 of the mounting opposition to an Iraq invasion in 2003, “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers”, effectively ratfucking the whole Democratic party in one go.

But all it takes is a sea change in opinion for a veteran ratfucker to lose favour. If anything precipitated the resignation of Rove in 2007, it was an overreaching of policy. With approval ratings for Bush slipping daily, reaching as low as 19%, Rove had to weather the Valerie Plame scandal, where he was implicated in leaking the name of a covert CIA operative because her husband had spoken out against the flimsy evidence used to go to war. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby took the fall, but the accusations it was Rove were deafening.

The dismissal of 8 US attorneys on suspected political grounds (they weren’t ‘Bushies’) snowballed into an email scandal which hit Rove hard: he was accused of organising a covert and external email system to conduct certain business outside of the Whitehouse grid, meaning up to 5 million emails which could relate directly to ongoing investigations were effectively ‘lost’ and unaccountable. Rove had become the one thing a backroom politico shouldn’t be - he’d become the story, when he should have been writing it. He resigned.

So where now for the prospective ratfucker? A sea change in public opinion means the Great Neo-con Experiment is in tatters. John McCain is a lock for the Republican candidacy, against either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for a race that has the potential to be the most decent, issues led one in years. But the ratfuckers are still there, at the periphery - an anonymous pamphlet accusing war hero and 5 year POW McCain of betraying his men in Vietnam; The constant emphasis on right wing talk radio on Barack HUSSEIN Obama; pictures ‘leaked’ of Obama in Muslim-esque Kenyan garb, and accusations he’s a Muslim (he isn’t) who attended a Madrassa (he didn’t); scare stories about Clinton’s health plans; a reawakening of Whitewater references… the ratfucking continues, and this is just the primaries. We can expect a rash of wannabe Roves helping the campaigns coming up; a new generation of ratfuckers to carry on a grand American tradition.

And if that don’t work, there’s always vote-rigging.

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This post is tagged Elections, Politics