With the general election campaign for US Senate about to start kicking into high gear, I thought it would be useful to revisit what George Allen advisor Dick Wadhams did using blogs against Tom Daschle in the 2004 US Senate race in South Dakota. As you may recall, Daschle lost that race by just 4,500 votes out of 390,000 cast to John Thune, a harsh right-winger who attacked Daschle's patriotism, among other things, during an extremely nasty campaign.By numerous accounts, blogs played a big part in Thune's victory, and Wadhams played a role:
Virginia Senator George Allen recently hired Thune's campaign manager, Dick Wadhams, for his future Senate or presidential campaigns no doubt partly because he was involved in a campaign where a cheap investment in blogging seems to have had a major impact...A $35,000 investment is a drop in the bucket of the $35 million Senate campaign, but as direct advertising to the very people you want to influence, it had an effect. Did it tip the race? Considering that Daschle lost by just 4,500 votes out of 390,000, it couldn+óGé¼Gäót have hurt.What is certain is the fact that there's a lot of potential in using blogging to rattle the mind of a person who has large responsibilities -- such as a newspaper editor or reporter -- if you can make sure that they'll pay attention to your blog. If this is the story Thune told his colleagues, we can look forward to hearing about shaken journalists at papers across the country in the coming elections.
Now, here's Slate magazine on Wadhams:
...for his race against Daschle, Thune heeded the advice of the Bush White House, dumped his first campaign team, and hired Dick Wadhams. The 49-year-old operative comes across as an aging country boy, but he is renowned for running nasty and effective campaigns. In South Dakota he honed his slash-and-burn reputation, relentlessly attacking Daschle about his Washington, D.C., home, luxury car, and lobbyist wife. At one point, Wadhams accused the former minority leader of having "emboldened Saddam Hussein." Thune won, by a slim margin, and gratefully dubbed his campaign manager "the best pit bull out there."[...]
...[Wadhams's] approach mirrors not only Rove's but also that of the late Lee Atwater, creator of the Willie Horton ads that helped sink Michael Dukakis. While most campaign managers are defensive about going negative, however+óGé¼GÇ¥Atwater, for example, claimed he got the idea for the Horton ads from Al Gore's primary campaign+óGé¼GÇ¥Wadhams is entirely unapologetic. "There's nothing wrong with going negative," he once argued. "Staying positive is a disservice to the voters because differences between the candidates are never revealed."
Lovely, eh? A "pit bull" who thinks that "staying positive is a disservice to the voters." Wonderful. Anyway, back to South Dakota and the bloggers. According to Slate:
Another way to control a campaign is to shape its news coverage, and Wadhams found a new way to do that for the Thune campaign. South Dakota Republicans had long accused the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, the state's most influential paper, of being pro-Daschle. When two bloggers, Jason Van Beek and Jon Lauck, began cataloguing alleged acts of bias like lack of criticism of Linda Daschle's lobbying practice, Wadhams hired them as campaign researchers. Wadhams insists he wasn't underwriting the bloggers' online enterprises. But Van Beek and Lauck didn't disclose that the Thune campaign was cutting them checks. And they succeeded in aiding Thune: The assistant managing editor of the Argus Leader admitted that the paper's coverage had been affected by the online criticism, implicitly acknowledging that it was tougher on Daschle in the Thune race than it had been in the past.
So, Wadhams is now working for George Allen here in Virginia, where he is likely to do very much the same thing that he did in South Dakota. With millions of dollars to burn, don't you think it's likely that the Allen campaign is going to use bloggers as much as possible this campaign season? Do you think they'll all disclose their affiliation with the Allen campaign? Was Wadhams discussed at the bloggers' summit this weekend? According to the Charlottesville Daily Progress:
Conference participants also blasted the practice of using paid bloggers, not identified as paid by a campaign, as U.S. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., did in 2004 when he defeated then-Sen. Thomas Daschle by about 4,000 votes.
I wasn't at the conference, mainly because I had several other important things to do this weekend (including, appropriately, live blogging with Jim Webb on Daily Kos). However, I find it hard to believe that right-wing, pro-Allen bloggers really "blasted" what Dick Wadhams did in South Dakota. They certainly never "blasted it" prior to this weekend, that's for sure. In fact, right-wing bloggers were extremely happy to have defeated Tom Daschle, by whatever means necessary. Hell, the only thing the right-wing blogosphere blasted with regard to the South Dakota Senate race was Tom Daschle's patriotism, his wife, and just about everything else about him. But Dick Wadhams? He done good.
Let's face it, bloggers can be as "friendly" in person as they want go be, and that's just precious (yes, that was dripping sarcasm there). But let's get real here: the blogs are the front lines in a war between the warped ideology known as neo-con/theocratic "conservativsm" on the one hand, and Harry Truman/JFK/RFK Progressivism on the other. Being "friendly" in person doesn't change that, nor does it change what Dick Wadhams, Scott "Hitler Ads" Howell, and George "Bush" Allen plan to do over the next few months. Think, nasty. Really nasty.
We already saw some element of this by Miller bloggers during the primary.
The problem of course is that with the exception of a few clearly conservative bloggers no one will buy their baloney-slicing.
But we need to monitor their activity. And those who runj sites may wnat to be checking the places from which negative types are posting -- never know what you might find.
Maybe Allen will run a bear ad of some sort. Yeah, that's the ticket :-).
He must hate his father. Reminds of the Johnny Cash song - Boy Named Sue.
On a serious note, I see little purpose in paying bloggers to help the campaign. This is just as bad as paying off editorial boards. I think that bloggers who want to have any credibility should not take money from those whom they are blogging about in exchange for slanting their views. And politicians should not make such offers.
If campaigns start paying the bloggers, none of us will be taken seriously and we will all lose credibility. Any blogger on the payroll of a campaign should at minimum have a disclaimer to that effect.
Now, if you work for the campaign as a paid staffer for non-blog related duties that is fine. But in your blog you should be upfront about that if you talk about the campaign.
Given that this is a new topic I think we will find ourselves faced with many ethical challenges. I would hope that most bloggers do the right thing or at least act in good faith. We should accept that people make mistakes, but not accept people knowingly and willingly doing such a thing.
Ever since JFK beat Nixon in the 1st televised political debate in 1960, Republicans have been determined to master technology and use it control the masses. Think talk radio, Fox News, now the Internet.
Daschle's defeat not only verifies that theory, but also guarantees that they will be eager to use it here in VA to protect George "Bush's Boy" Allen.
One major difference between Democrats and Republicans is the fact that Republicans recognize new technologies and invest in them. Democrats are still struggling to understand the need for a future infrastructure and invest in it (except for this year's YearlyKos, where a bunch of high profile future Democratic Presidential candidates now in 2006! try to desperately woo what they clearly see as a bunch of strange, socially awkward, obsessive individuals) and like everything else, Dems pour money into the consistently failed tactics of consultants like Bob Shrum. While there are great consultants out there, a lot of those out still don't recognize the value of the Internet, sure, Dean used it in 2004 and we have moveon.org, but even most liberals (sorry is that a bad word even for us?) tend to view even their successful use of technology with a skepticism and derision.
It isn't surprising to me that 3 of the 5 highly paid DC Democratic political consultants that I talked to this week either didn't know much about political blogs or openly sneered at them as if they were insignificant.
I could remind them that the Webb campaign started as a grassroots, netroots draft movement heavily pushed by this blog, but I'm sure they still wouldn't get it.
However, the February 5, 2005 article from the Personal Democracy Forum that Lowell first links to above makes it clear that Republicans get it. The article also lays out another highly placed relationship.
An example of the Republican skill to see an advantage and build upon it, besides the two SD bloggers that Lowell mentioned and also mentioned in the Personal Democracy Forum article, is Jeff Gannon of the former Talon News reporter. While most will remember the scandal surrounding the discovery of the gay prostitute posing as a reporter among the White House Press Corps, a closer look at his actual record will reveal Gannon's actual role in the Daschle defeat.
As the CBS story reports:
Daschle opponent John Thune's campaign manager was Dick Wadham, an old political crony of Karl Rove's; the kind of pal Rove could ask to hire his first cousin, John Wood, a few years back. Wadham put the bloggers on the campaign payroll and the symbiotic relationship between the campaign, the bloggers and "reporter" Gannon continued. On September 29, Gannon broke the story that Daschle had claimed a special tax exemption for a house in Washington and the bloggers jumped all over it. According to a November 17 posting on South Dakota Politics – a site that Van Beek, who has become a staffer for now-Sen. Thune, has bequeathed to Lauck – "Jeff Gannon, whose reportage had a dramatic impact on the Daschle v. Thune race (his story about Sen. Daschle signing a legal document claiming to be a D.C. resident was published nearly the same day Thune began to run an ad showing Daschle saying, "I'm a D.C. resident) has written an analysis of the debacle."Daschle aides told Roll Call, "This guy (Gannon) became the dumping ground for opposition research"...
Gannon also had Thune on his radio show "Jeff Gannon's Washington," and the White House correspondent for Talon became touted as the "resident D.C. expert on South Dakota politics" by the bloggers. Thune and Wadham (who has been hired by aspiring White House Republican Sen. George Allen) have become go-to guys on the use of blogs in campaigns. Thune was cited in The New York Times as introducing "Senators to the meaning of 'blogging,' explaining the basics of self-published online political commentary and arguing that it can affect public opinion.
Surprising how this story tells a familiar narrative; Republicans using a new technology to harass journalists or plant stories in the press to drive the news cycle to their candidate's advantage. It's an interesting idea, ingenious and clever...I'm surprised that after six years of watching the MSM sit on its hands while major stories are being broken by a bunch of nose-picking amateur journalist dressed in their pajamas and then chased by the MSM that Democratic leaders only a stone-throws away from Arlington have been slow to embrace this cheap and effective media.
Let's hope that it won't take much longer before Democrats finally get it. Not only do we have 2006 to worry about, but ’08 is storming up on us faster than some potential Dem Presidential candidates can raise money. Certainly YearlyKos was a great event, but a one-time technological orgy doesn't support a movement, it only feeds a logger’s belly once rather than sustaining it.
Right now I believe we should concentrate on raising money for our candidates. Money is where Allen has a clear advantage and we can't rely on 3% voter turnout this time. With a turnout that low, the bloggers really did have a big effect, but for now, we're still going to have have to compete with Allen in the money department. This is not the movies. If were going to get Mr. Snith to Washington it's gonna take more than blogs and bake sales. I'm hoping Jim will get some good cash from the national Dems, as this race is the one they've really put themselves on the line for.
Let's try to find Jim some money. I have no doubt the bloggers will be important, but maybe not as much as the low turnout primary. Cash is going to count and Allen's people will be on the blogs. You can bet on it. Here in Kentucky, Anne Nortup's people are starting to pop up on the blogs and they seem pretty organized. I expect the same thing will happen in Virginia.
Just my opinion, of course.
Nick
Republicans are smart enough to do both at the same time. They understand the value of an investment. It pays off, Daschle is no longer in office, Thune is, Republicans picked up seats in the Senate last cycle, Democrats got spanked.
I'd like to see a party that could chew gum and walk at the same time; not too much to ask I think.