J
Joe S.
Guest
QUOTE
Down and dirty with the GOP down South
Vote buying, astroturfing, anonymous attacks -- the 2008 Republican
contenders keep hitting each other below the belt in South Carolina.
By Michael Scherer
Apr. 23, 2007 | Maybe it's the legacy of Lee Atwater. Maybe it's some
lingering Confederate spunkiness. It might even be all the sweet tea. But
one thing is unmistakably true: Republican Party politics in South Carolina
is a down and dirty affair.
"We tried to explain to the folks in Boston early on that it's a little
different here," says Terry Sullivan, a veteran political operative who is
running former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in the
Palmetto State. "It's kind of a knife fight."
Not that Sullivan, or anyone else for that matter, will admit to ever
drawing a blade. That's part of the game. When you work in South Carolina,
you pretend to take the high road, even as your allies conspire behind the
scenes to bend or break the rules. They set up phony grass-roots groups,
launch anonymous attacks and, as happened this weekend, pay money for straw
poll votes. Everyone is usually on the attack, and few are as innocent as
they claim.
On Friday night, tempers flared amid the die-hards of the Greenville County
Republican Party, who gathered in the downtown expo center to prepare for
Saturday's convention. All the major presidential candidates, with the
notable exception of John McCain, were coming, and the party planned to
stage a straw poll, an unscientific survey of the county's "delegates,"
which basically meant anyone who paid $15 and submitted some paperwork.
Straw polls in South Carolina are an obsession and a scourge for
Republicans, the topic of endless press releases and meaningless chest
thumping. They are easily corruptible. At some point on Friday night, Esther
Wagner, the county GOP treasurer, spotted a Romney aide across the hall, and
accused him of paying delegate fees to pump up Romney's poll numbers.
Wagner's suspicions had been aroused earlier in the month, when she received
a stack of last-minute registrations from about 15 to 20 people. Most of the
fees had been paid in cash. "That is unusual," said Wagner, who has done
work on the side for another candidate, John Cox, a minor rival to Romney.
"Most people pay [by] check." Then she got a call from a Romney supporter
named Jeff Lynch, who mentioned in passing that someone had paid his fee.
The women of the Greenville County Republican Party confronted the Romney
aide with Wagner's allegations. "Chris Slick, who is Romney's grass-roots
field coordinator, was emphatically denying it," says Betty Poe, the
president of the Greenville County Republican Women's Club. According to
three separate accounts of the incident, Slick maintained that neither the
Romney campaign, nor any campaign staff, had paid delegate fees. "But he
said an individual paid for someone," Poe remembers.
By midday Saturday, the upstate area was rife with rumors of a fixed straw
poll. When I asked Sullivan, Romney's state advisor, if the campaign was
paying for supporters' votes, he said, "No, absolutely not." But he admitted
to recruiting people to the polls as so-called proxy delegates, which he
said was a common practice among the campaigns. The campaign of former New
York Mayor Rudy Giuliani also admitted some "friend-to-friend" recruitment
of delegates, but denied paying any delegate fees. A few hours later, I
tracked down Lynch, a gospel musician, at his home in Greenville.
"We were delegates of Mitt Romney, so we didn't have to pay," Lynch said.
Like thousands of South Carolinians, Lynch and his wife, Melissa, have been
bombarded with direct mail from the presidential candidates. He sent back a
card from Romney, saying he would like to help. Sometime later, he said,
Slick, the Romney aide, showed up at his door, and told him not to worry
about the money. "He came over and we signed papers to be delegates, so we
wouldn't have to pay the $15 fee," Lynch said. "Is there a problem?"
The Greenville GOP has no rules barring a candidate, or anyone else, from
paying a supporter's delegate fees, says Wendy Nanney, the outgoing
chairman. But her concerns about the integrity of the straw poll have been
growing. She has heard rumors that other campaigns had collected money for
delegates. "It might be something we need to look at," she said. In the
final tally, Romney won the Greenville poll, followed by former Arkansas
Gov. Mike Huckabee and California Rep. Duncan Hunter. Huckabee also scored
well at the Spartanburg County convention, where he was rated higher by
delegates on the issues than Giuliani, Hunter or Romney, who finished in
second, third and fourth place, respectively.
As for the Romney campaign, its representatives did not return my calls when
I asked for a response to the Lynch story. Slick responded by e-mail, saying
he could not speak on the record with a reporter. The campaign press shop in
Boston, which is usually prompt to respond, was nowhere to be found.
Such shenanigans might not matter much, if it were not for the fact that
South Carolina has picked every successful Republican nominee for president
since 1980, when it solidified Ronald Reagan's Southern appeal. Sen. Bob
Dole called the state a "firewall" that would have prevented him from
getting the nomination in 1988, had he managed to survive the New Hampshire
primary. In that same year, the Palmetto primary effectively killed the
campaign of insurgent preacher-candidate Pat Robertson. It derailed the
populist candidacy of Pat Buchanan in 1996. In 2000, John McCain's meteoric
rise succumbed to a shower of negative attacks here, including anonymous
push polls and leaflets that falsely accused him of fathering an
illegitimate black child and televised attack ads approved by the campaign
of President Bush.
"The person who wins the South Carolina primary generally becomes the
nominee," explained South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a McCain supporter,
after speaking Saturday at the Spartanburg County convention. "It's a test
of a red state. It will be a real test of strength among conservatives in
general. So you have to have your best game on."
No one has forgotten that Karl Rove's mentor, Lee Atwater, who authored the
Willie Horton ads in 1988, earned his stripes in South Carolina politics.
His take-no-prisoners legacy lives on. A couple of weeks ago, the McCain
campaign released its first negative flier at an event in South Carolina, a
one-pager first reported by the Washington Post, that selectively quoted
Romney and Giuliani, portraying them as pro-choice, anti-gun, and pro-gay
rights. This week, Hunter put out a negative flier in Spartanburg that
accused McCain of backing amnesty for illegal aliens and Romney of
supporting equality for gays and lesbians. Before speaking at the
Spartanburg convention, Hunter defended the flier. "I think it's good," he
told me. "I say the Republicans are good guys with strong differences. I
simply point out voting records."
The most vicious signed attacks in South Carolina have come from the
otherwise marginal campaign of John Cox, a quirky certified public
accountant from Illinois, who speaks of his lesbian sister when he discusses
his opposition to gay marriage, and claims his father raped his mother when
he discusses his opposition to abortion. He has been distributing an
eight-page flier that calls Romney "The Dukakis Republican," calls McCain
"McKennedy," and calls Huckabee "The Tax-and-Spend/Soft on Crime
Republican." Two weeks ago, the flier created a ruckus at the Charleston
County convention, when Cindy Costa, a national committeewoman and Romney
supporter, demanded that the fliers be barred from the room. "This is the
kind of stuff that turns people off," Costa said, to no avail. When I saw
Cox in Spartanburg on Friday, he was complaining about the fact that the New
York Times will not cover his campaign.
But the best action in South Carolina politics occurs in the shadows, with
carefully constructed deniability. Back in March, anonymous e-mails and
unsigned mailers started appearing in Republican voters' homes, attacking
Romney as a Mormon with "a secret," a bogus charge that amounted to some
details about his great-grandfather's and great-great-grandfather's
polygamist pasts. A veteran showed up in Spartanburg with a
never-before-heard-of nonprofit called the "South Carolina Veterans
Coalition," and then accused the local county chairman, Rick Beltram, of
being a Romney patsy who planned to stack the deck in the upcoming county
straw poll. At the straw poll itself, Beltram's teenage daughter burst into
tears after being berated by a McCain campaign staffer, who was apparently
concerned she was stealing votes.
Then there was the "Collegiate Republican" incident. State Sen. John
Courson, a McCain supporter, says he got a call on a Friday afternoon in
March from some self-described "College Republicans" at the University of
South Carolina. They said their keynote convention speaker had dropped out,
and asked if he could come by to speak. Since the university campus was on
his way home, he dropped in, gave some welcoming remarks to a group of about
11 people, and then left. The next day, a group calling itself the "South
Carolina Collegiate Republicans" put out a press release using Courson's
name that claimed Romney had won its convention straw poll, with 53 percent
of the votes.
It turned out that the "Collegiate" Republicans is a spinoff group from the
officially authorized "College Republicans," organized with the help of a
Romney campaign operative, in part because the Romney campaign is suspicious
of McCain's ties to the leadership of the official state College
Republicans. "Their whole purpose was to get on a press release," said
Taylor Hall, the executive director of the official College Republicans, who
denied any favoritism to McCain. Sen. Courson now acknowledges that he was
duped by the "Collegiate" group, but he holds no hard feelings. This is how
it goes in South Carolina. "We were the first state to secede from the
union, the only state to go out unanimously," Courson told me. "It's a fun
state."
Last week, South Carolina made headlines again when a heretofore anonymous
tracker posted a carefully edited video online that showed McCain singing a
parody of a Beach Boys song in a lighthearted response to a question about
bombing Iran. The video promptly made its way to the Drudge Report and to a
South Carolina blog called the Chaser, which often posts unflattering videos
and allegations about McCain. The Chaser is run by a political operative
named Tim Cameron, who works for the consulting firm Thompson Tompkins &
Sullivan. Two of the named partners in that firm, Warren Tompkins and Terry
Sullivan, now work for the Romney campaign, but Sullivan maintains that
Cameron's work on the blog is totally independent from his work for the
firm. "No relation," said Sullivan. "This blog is his, on his own."
There have been some efforts to limit the intra-party back stabbing. On
Friday night, the Spartanburg County GOP held a hot dog cookout, billed as
"Unity Rally," with about 40 party activists in a downtown park. Beltram,
the county chairman, said he wanted to send a message that campaigns must
minimize the negativity and pledge to support whomever wins the final
nomination. The keynote speaker was Huckabee, who started in on his standard
stump speech, after offering some words about working together to defeat the
Democrats.
But about 15 minutes into the speech, as the sun set over a grassy
Spartanburg knoll, he turned his words on at least one of his Republican
opponents. "I didn't just recently come around to the idea that life begins
at conception," he said. "I didn't just recently get converted to the notion
that the Second Amendment is there so you can protect your family and your
property, and so we can protect the nation."
Afterward, I asked Huckabee if it was fair to characterize those words as a
thinly veiled attack on Romney, who joined the National Rifle Association
and professed a commitment to pro-life policies in just the last few years.
"What? What? No!" Huckabee responded, with a smile and a sarcastic tone. "I
didn't call anybody out. I'm not going after anybody. I'm just stating the
obvious."
So it goes down in South Carolina. It's a knife fight, after all, with no
one holding a blade.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/04/23/south_carolina/print.html
END QUOTE
Down and dirty with the GOP down South
Vote buying, astroturfing, anonymous attacks -- the 2008 Republican
contenders keep hitting each other below the belt in South Carolina.
By Michael Scherer
Apr. 23, 2007 | Maybe it's the legacy of Lee Atwater. Maybe it's some
lingering Confederate spunkiness. It might even be all the sweet tea. But
one thing is unmistakably true: Republican Party politics in South Carolina
is a down and dirty affair.
"We tried to explain to the folks in Boston early on that it's a little
different here," says Terry Sullivan, a veteran political operative who is
running former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in the
Palmetto State. "It's kind of a knife fight."
Not that Sullivan, or anyone else for that matter, will admit to ever
drawing a blade. That's part of the game. When you work in South Carolina,
you pretend to take the high road, even as your allies conspire behind the
scenes to bend or break the rules. They set up phony grass-roots groups,
launch anonymous attacks and, as happened this weekend, pay money for straw
poll votes. Everyone is usually on the attack, and few are as innocent as
they claim.
On Friday night, tempers flared amid the die-hards of the Greenville County
Republican Party, who gathered in the downtown expo center to prepare for
Saturday's convention. All the major presidential candidates, with the
notable exception of John McCain, were coming, and the party planned to
stage a straw poll, an unscientific survey of the county's "delegates,"
which basically meant anyone who paid $15 and submitted some paperwork.
Straw polls in South Carolina are an obsession and a scourge for
Republicans, the topic of endless press releases and meaningless chest
thumping. They are easily corruptible. At some point on Friday night, Esther
Wagner, the county GOP treasurer, spotted a Romney aide across the hall, and
accused him of paying delegate fees to pump up Romney's poll numbers.
Wagner's suspicions had been aroused earlier in the month, when she received
a stack of last-minute registrations from about 15 to 20 people. Most of the
fees had been paid in cash. "That is unusual," said Wagner, who has done
work on the side for another candidate, John Cox, a minor rival to Romney.
"Most people pay [by] check." Then she got a call from a Romney supporter
named Jeff Lynch, who mentioned in passing that someone had paid his fee.
The women of the Greenville County Republican Party confronted the Romney
aide with Wagner's allegations. "Chris Slick, who is Romney's grass-roots
field coordinator, was emphatically denying it," says Betty Poe, the
president of the Greenville County Republican Women's Club. According to
three separate accounts of the incident, Slick maintained that neither the
Romney campaign, nor any campaign staff, had paid delegate fees. "But he
said an individual paid for someone," Poe remembers.
By midday Saturday, the upstate area was rife with rumors of a fixed straw
poll. When I asked Sullivan, Romney's state advisor, if the campaign was
paying for supporters' votes, he said, "No, absolutely not." But he admitted
to recruiting people to the polls as so-called proxy delegates, which he
said was a common practice among the campaigns. The campaign of former New
York Mayor Rudy Giuliani also admitted some "friend-to-friend" recruitment
of delegates, but denied paying any delegate fees. A few hours later, I
tracked down Lynch, a gospel musician, at his home in Greenville.
"We were delegates of Mitt Romney, so we didn't have to pay," Lynch said.
Like thousands of South Carolinians, Lynch and his wife, Melissa, have been
bombarded with direct mail from the presidential candidates. He sent back a
card from Romney, saying he would like to help. Sometime later, he said,
Slick, the Romney aide, showed up at his door, and told him not to worry
about the money. "He came over and we signed papers to be delegates, so we
wouldn't have to pay the $15 fee," Lynch said. "Is there a problem?"
The Greenville GOP has no rules barring a candidate, or anyone else, from
paying a supporter's delegate fees, says Wendy Nanney, the outgoing
chairman. But her concerns about the integrity of the straw poll have been
growing. She has heard rumors that other campaigns had collected money for
delegates. "It might be something we need to look at," she said. In the
final tally, Romney won the Greenville poll, followed by former Arkansas
Gov. Mike Huckabee and California Rep. Duncan Hunter. Huckabee also scored
well at the Spartanburg County convention, where he was rated higher by
delegates on the issues than Giuliani, Hunter or Romney, who finished in
second, third and fourth place, respectively.
As for the Romney campaign, its representatives did not return my calls when
I asked for a response to the Lynch story. Slick responded by e-mail, saying
he could not speak on the record with a reporter. The campaign press shop in
Boston, which is usually prompt to respond, was nowhere to be found.
Such shenanigans might not matter much, if it were not for the fact that
South Carolina has picked every successful Republican nominee for president
since 1980, when it solidified Ronald Reagan's Southern appeal. Sen. Bob
Dole called the state a "firewall" that would have prevented him from
getting the nomination in 1988, had he managed to survive the New Hampshire
primary. In that same year, the Palmetto primary effectively killed the
campaign of insurgent preacher-candidate Pat Robertson. It derailed the
populist candidacy of Pat Buchanan in 1996. In 2000, John McCain's meteoric
rise succumbed to a shower of negative attacks here, including anonymous
push polls and leaflets that falsely accused him of fathering an
illegitimate black child and televised attack ads approved by the campaign
of President Bush.
"The person who wins the South Carolina primary generally becomes the
nominee," explained South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a McCain supporter,
after speaking Saturday at the Spartanburg County convention. "It's a test
of a red state. It will be a real test of strength among conservatives in
general. So you have to have your best game on."
No one has forgotten that Karl Rove's mentor, Lee Atwater, who authored the
Willie Horton ads in 1988, earned his stripes in South Carolina politics.
His take-no-prisoners legacy lives on. A couple of weeks ago, the McCain
campaign released its first negative flier at an event in South Carolina, a
one-pager first reported by the Washington Post, that selectively quoted
Romney and Giuliani, portraying them as pro-choice, anti-gun, and pro-gay
rights. This week, Hunter put out a negative flier in Spartanburg that
accused McCain of backing amnesty for illegal aliens and Romney of
supporting equality for gays and lesbians. Before speaking at the
Spartanburg convention, Hunter defended the flier. "I think it's good," he
told me. "I say the Republicans are good guys with strong differences. I
simply point out voting records."
The most vicious signed attacks in South Carolina have come from the
otherwise marginal campaign of John Cox, a quirky certified public
accountant from Illinois, who speaks of his lesbian sister when he discusses
his opposition to gay marriage, and claims his father raped his mother when
he discusses his opposition to abortion. He has been distributing an
eight-page flier that calls Romney "The Dukakis Republican," calls McCain
"McKennedy," and calls Huckabee "The Tax-and-Spend/Soft on Crime
Republican." Two weeks ago, the flier created a ruckus at the Charleston
County convention, when Cindy Costa, a national committeewoman and Romney
supporter, demanded that the fliers be barred from the room. "This is the
kind of stuff that turns people off," Costa said, to no avail. When I saw
Cox in Spartanburg on Friday, he was complaining about the fact that the New
York Times will not cover his campaign.
But the best action in South Carolina politics occurs in the shadows, with
carefully constructed deniability. Back in March, anonymous e-mails and
unsigned mailers started appearing in Republican voters' homes, attacking
Romney as a Mormon with "a secret," a bogus charge that amounted to some
details about his great-grandfather's and great-great-grandfather's
polygamist pasts. A veteran showed up in Spartanburg with a
never-before-heard-of nonprofit called the "South Carolina Veterans
Coalition," and then accused the local county chairman, Rick Beltram, of
being a Romney patsy who planned to stack the deck in the upcoming county
straw poll. At the straw poll itself, Beltram's teenage daughter burst into
tears after being berated by a McCain campaign staffer, who was apparently
concerned she was stealing votes.
Then there was the "Collegiate Republican" incident. State Sen. John
Courson, a McCain supporter, says he got a call on a Friday afternoon in
March from some self-described "College Republicans" at the University of
South Carolina. They said their keynote convention speaker had dropped out,
and asked if he could come by to speak. Since the university campus was on
his way home, he dropped in, gave some welcoming remarks to a group of about
11 people, and then left. The next day, a group calling itself the "South
Carolina Collegiate Republicans" put out a press release using Courson's
name that claimed Romney had won its convention straw poll, with 53 percent
of the votes.
It turned out that the "Collegiate" Republicans is a spinoff group from the
officially authorized "College Republicans," organized with the help of a
Romney campaign operative, in part because the Romney campaign is suspicious
of McCain's ties to the leadership of the official state College
Republicans. "Their whole purpose was to get on a press release," said
Taylor Hall, the executive director of the official College Republicans, who
denied any favoritism to McCain. Sen. Courson now acknowledges that he was
duped by the "Collegiate" group, but he holds no hard feelings. This is how
it goes in South Carolina. "We were the first state to secede from the
union, the only state to go out unanimously," Courson told me. "It's a fun
state."
Last week, South Carolina made headlines again when a heretofore anonymous
tracker posted a carefully edited video online that showed McCain singing a
parody of a Beach Boys song in a lighthearted response to a question about
bombing Iran. The video promptly made its way to the Drudge Report and to a
South Carolina blog called the Chaser, which often posts unflattering videos
and allegations about McCain. The Chaser is run by a political operative
named Tim Cameron, who works for the consulting firm Thompson Tompkins &
Sullivan. Two of the named partners in that firm, Warren Tompkins and Terry
Sullivan, now work for the Romney campaign, but Sullivan maintains that
Cameron's work on the blog is totally independent from his work for the
firm. "No relation," said Sullivan. "This blog is his, on his own."
There have been some efforts to limit the intra-party back stabbing. On
Friday night, the Spartanburg County GOP held a hot dog cookout, billed as
"Unity Rally," with about 40 party activists in a downtown park. Beltram,
the county chairman, said he wanted to send a message that campaigns must
minimize the negativity and pledge to support whomever wins the final
nomination. The keynote speaker was Huckabee, who started in on his standard
stump speech, after offering some words about working together to defeat the
Democrats.
But about 15 minutes into the speech, as the sun set over a grassy
Spartanburg knoll, he turned his words on at least one of his Republican
opponents. "I didn't just recently come around to the idea that life begins
at conception," he said. "I didn't just recently get converted to the notion
that the Second Amendment is there so you can protect your family and your
property, and so we can protect the nation."
Afterward, I asked Huckabee if it was fair to characterize those words as a
thinly veiled attack on Romney, who joined the National Rifle Association
and professed a commitment to pro-life policies in just the last few years.
"What? What? No!" Huckabee responded, with a smile and a sarcastic tone. "I
didn't call anybody out. I'm not going after anybody. I'm just stating the
obvious."
So it goes down in South Carolina. It's a knife fight, after all, with no
one holding a blade.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/04/23/south_carolina/print.html
END QUOTE
