The Republican war room in Denver looked harmless. It was on a busy road in a neighbourhood of modest motels and petrol stations. Only a handmade sign, emblazoned with an arrow and the words ”John McCain”, pointed the way.
But looks can be deceiving. More than two dozen Republican staffers were camped in Denver last week, spearheading the latest assaults on Barack Obama who was addressing the Democratic convention nearby. ”We came here to piss the Democrats off,” said one Republican aide with a grin.
They have largely succeeded. Each day new adverts have hammered a relentless drumbeat of negativity, painting Obama as too liberal, too inexperienced and practically a danger to America’s future. Leading lights of the Republican universe have paraded in front of the cameras in a disciplined display of party message-making. A typical performance came from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. ”There are still a lot of serious questions about Barack Obama’s preparedness to lead the country,” Giuliani said, before stepping aside to showcase the latest ad on a huge flat-screen TV.
The ad attacked Obama as being so ignorant of foreign affairs that he was virtually a security threat himself. It touched on scare issues such as Islamic terrorism and Iranian nukes. Then it represented Obama’s positions on national security as naive and weak. ”These are contrast ads,” Giuliani said afterwards. ”And both sides do them.”
That is only half-true. Democrats do launch attack ads and campaign negatively but no one does it like the Republican party. Under a succession of dark geniuses, the party has perfected the black art of negative campaigning. It has created the most effective attack machine in the Western world, with the sole purpose of destroying opponents and winning elections. For opponents it is a source of shock, misery and more than a little envy. Its tentacles stretch from the McCain campaign into the murky corners of talk radio, the internet and shadowy groups willing to use any outlandish smear.
Now that machine is focused with laser-like intensity on Obama. The clamour is loud and shrill: Obama is vain, inexperienced, liberal and dangerous. It is backed by a clandestine chorus whispering that he has a secretive Islamic past and it uses racially loaded language. It is also only going to get louder. This week, as McCain and the Republicans gather for their party convention in the Minnesota city of St Paul, the noise will become deafening. It has one purpose — to keep the White House in Republican hands at all costs and against the odds.
The current mastermind of the Republican attack machine is known as the Bullet. He is Steve Schmidt, a protégé of Bush’s guru, Karl Rove. Nicknamed for his results as much as his bald head, he made his name as commander of the war room that wiped out Democrat John Kerry in 2004. Brought in to shake things up in July, Schmidt imposed discipline on a disorganised campaign. He dissuaded McCain from his off-the-cuff chats with reporters, and honed the focus solely on making Obama unelectable.
Schmidt works on the principles of repeating simple messages loudly and often. Ads attack Obama as a ”celebrity” or a faux-messiah. By doing so they hope to turn Obama’s greatest strength — his ability to inspire — into a fatal flaw. That is backed up by another line: that Obama is simply not fit to be president. NotReady08 is the name of a website set up by the campaign. The language can be harsh. ”We are in the hunt for the White House. Barack Obama is going to have to step up with more than a smart tongue, snappy words and a nice suit,” said Maryland Republican politician Michael Steele.
The campaign will happily twist words. In the ad that Giuliani showed, Obama was hit for referring to the ”tiny” threat from a nuclear Iran. In reality Obama had been pointing out that the problem of Iran was ” … tiny compared to the Soviet Union”. Others have interspersed footage of the Democrat candidate with images of Britney Spears. One jokey advert painted him as a Moses-type figure capable of parting the Red Sea. Mocking his message of ”hope” and ”change”, radio host Rush Limbaugh has taken to referring on-air to Obama as simply ”the Messiah”.
The attack dogs will eagerly embrace formerly hated targets. All last week Republicans lauded the achievements and brilliance of Hillary Clinton, seeking to exploit divisions in the Democratic Party. It has rounded up former Clinton supporters who now back McCain and paraded them like captured prisoners of war. ”[McCain] really does admire and respect her and honours the campaign that she ran,” said Carly Fiorina, a top McCain adviser.
Those are astonishing words from a senior figure in a party which spent two decades demonising Clinton as a left-wing über-feminist. But that is the key to the success of the Republican attack machine: the past does not exist. What matters is what works now. Democrats know more of the same is coming. ”This is going to be the most vicious campaign we have ever faced,” said Terry McAuliffe, Clinton’s former campaign chairperson.
Schmidt and his public operations are merely the visible tip of the machine. But the most aggressive ads are not made by the McCain campaign. They are made by so-called ”527 groups” — named for a clause in the tax laws — that cannot officially be linked to any campaign. They are privately financed and exist outside the campaigns, like some sort of ”black ops” off the CIA budget. Democrats have been helped by 527 groups too, though Obama has tried to clamp down on their activities. But Republicans have found them to be highly effective.
The Swift Boat campaign that raised questions about Kerry’s Vietnam service in the 2004 campaign was a 527. It was financed largely by Texan billionaire Harold Simmons. Simmons has now donated $2,7-million to a 527 group called the American Issues Project. The AIP last week brought out the most negative ad in the campaign so far. It linked Obama to Bill Ayers, a former radical with the Weather Underground Organisation, which planted bombs in the 1960s. Ayers, now an academic, once sat on the board of an anti-poverty group alongside Obama and they have other minor connections. The ad, however, used the imagery of 9/11 to paint Obama as being friends with terrorists. Many more AIP ads will be in the works.
It’s not just the 527s. There is an industry devoted to publishing anti-Obama screeds. The most popular has been The Obama Nation, by conservative polemicist Jerome Corsi. The book paints a radical picture of Obama as having a secret Islamic past — but critics say the book can be proven to be wrong.
Corsi has also called for Obama to take a drugs test and warned that he might create a ”department of hate crimes” if elected. The Obama Nation has been a bestseller, relentlessly promoted by sympathetic media figures such as Fox News’s conservative host Sean Hannity. On his show, Hannity allowed Corsi to claim Obama wanted to allow women to have ”abortions” even after their child was born. Instead of refuting the ridiculous claim, Hannity merely expressed shock. The incident forced a liberal media watchdog to issue an analysis showing Obama had never actually supported the murder of newborn children.
Yet Hannity is just one of a pantheon of conservative media figures who echo the claims of the Republican machine and convey them to the general public in their millions. They include TV hosts such as Glenn Beck on CNN (who last week called Obama a ”Marxist”), Matt Drudge on the internet and radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, the most powerful single broadcaster in America with an estimated 20-million listeners a week on 600 stations. Limbaugh frequently paints Obama as benefiting from ”affirmative action” in his political career. He also makes frequent reference to Obama’s middle name, Hussein. Both are clumsy ways of inflaming racial and religious issues at the ballot box. They might also be effective.
The father of the modern Republican attack machine was Lee Atwater, a South Carolina native with a passion for blues guitar and brutal politics who, before he died of brain cancer in 1991, wrote letters of apology to many of those his aggressive campaigning had destroyed.
Before his profound change of heart Atwater changed the face of American politics. During the 1970s Atwater showed a flair for making the personal into the political. His tactics were condemned but they were effective, most notably in the destruction of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988 and the election of George Bush senior. Dukakis was accused of being a depressive, his wife was attacked as having once burned an American flag and finally he was hit by the infamous race-baiting ad that featured black murderer Willie Horton who committed armed robbery and rape after being released on a weekend furlough programme. ”Lee Atwater ruined the business of politics. It all began with him,” said McAuliffe.
Atwater also mentored the young Karl Rove. Rove, in his turn, mentored Schmidt. ”There is a reason why Steve Schmidt, who was mentored by Rove who was mentored by Atwater, is running John McCain’s campaign,” said Joe Conason, author of the book Big Lies. That reason is simple — these tactics work. When Republicans are shunning Bush’s record, attacking Obama personally is the strongest course of action.
Obama’s campaign is determined not to repeat the mistakes of Kerry, Al Gore and Dukakis. It has been pushing back hard. McCain’s recent admission that he did not know how many houses he owned was ruthlessly exploited. The Obama campaign has appeared to use coded language that refers disparagingly to McCain’s age. In his acceptance speech on Thursday night Obama did not shy away from strong language attacking McCain. Indeed he made veiled threats to deliver more, almost goading McCain to make the election a personal fight.
The Obama camp has also aggressively rebutted the flood of attack ads. Websites have been set up to prove many claims wrong. When the AIP ad on Ayers hit the airwaves last week, Obama staffers directly contacted TV stations and asked them not to run it. Some did, but others did not. Even Fox News stayed away from it. The campaign then went to the Justice Department, asking the ad to be taken off the air. That sort of attitude has a whiff of the hardball attitude that Bill Clinton used to get to the White House. The Corsi book also met an instant wave of rebuttal which helped dent its impact. ”Corsi’s book has not really succeeded. Not like the Swift Boats did,” said Conason.
Obama has learned how to defend himself but the Democratic attack machine is still far smaller than its Republican equivalent. Nevertheless we already know what a concerted effort to attack McCain looks like. The Republican machine tore into him in 2000 when he was running in the primaries against Bush. Then, with Rove at the helm, McCain was painted as a mentally unstable man who might have fathered an illegitimate black child. That destroyed his chances.
Now that same machine is backing McCain. This week in St Paul it will be gearing itself up to try to repeat its five wins in the past seven elections. Yet, amid the smears and muck-raking, perhaps there is something even greater at stake than the White House. Just months before he died, ravaged by a terrible cancer and barely able to move, Atwater wrote an article for Life magazine. In it he appealed for future political leaders to correct the power-hungry style of politics he himself had perfected.
”They must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumour of the soul,” he wrote. But, as the McCain camp prepares for the final leg of the election, most Republican operatives will be thinking only of Atwater’s many victories. Few will be considering what they cost and his deathbed plea for change.
Who are the attack dogs?
Sean Hannity
No one makes Fox News’s claim to be ”fair and balanced” more patently ridiculous than Hannity. The conservative talk-show host is as right-wing as they come and a highly effective cipher for Republican propaganda. He co-hosts his show with liberal Alan Colmes, but Colmes is reduced to the role of whipping boy rather than an alternative point of view. Hannity has championed the work of Jerome Corsi.
Jerome Corsi
Corsi makes a living out of writing muckraking books that appear to favour polemic over accuracy. The Cleveland native first took aim at John Kerry, penning a tome called Unfit for Command. But his greatest ”success” has been The Obama Nation. It has become a New York Times bestseller with its slanderous take on Obama’s life and politics. Say the title quickly and it turns into ”abomination”. Corsi probably thinks this is funny.
Rush Limbaugh
A colossus of US conservatism, his radio show is heard by millions across the country. His rants espouse a deeply conservative point of view that believes global warming does not exist and terrorists lurk behind every corner. He frequently makes an issue of Barack Obama’s race — but asked his listeners to back Obama in the Democratic race in what he called Operation Chaos as part of a strategy to keep the campaign as split as possible.
Glenn Beck
Conservative radio and television host and self-styled critic of political correctness. Once said of radical film-maker Michael Moore, ”I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire someone to do it. No, I think I could.” Recently asked an American pastor on air: ”Is Barack Obama the Antichrist?” Has also written two bestselling books: An Inconvenient Book and The Real America: Messages from the Heart and Heartland.
Steve Schmidt
Known as ”the Bullet” for his bald pate and hardball tactics, Schmidt is the new mastermind of John McCain’s attack strategy. He is ruthlessly disciplined and likes to operate behind the scenes. He is also very effective, helping to destroy John Kerry in 2004 and getting Arnold Schwarzenegger re-elected as governor of California in 2006. Unusually for a campaign professional, he is said to loathe Washington DC and prefers his home near the famously liberal city of San Francisco. – guardian.co.uk