The GOP pretends it’s never done oppo research (and dirty tricks) before
by digby
So the Republicans have decided to take up something really new and sexy:
“Well funded conservative groups should seek to hire activists to track Democratic incumbents and candidates with video cameras constantly recording their every movement, utterance, and action,” the report urged.
The five-member study group’s report outlined in stark terms what it wants:
“An allied group dedicated to research to establish a private archive and public website that does nothing but post inappropriate Democrat utterances and act as a clearinghouse for information on Democrats would serve as an effective vehicle for affecting the public issue debate.”
We all know about James O’Keefe and Breitbart’s phony “cinema verite” and we know what happens when someone films a presidential candidate in what they think is a private setting, don’t we? But the idea that this “archive” of “inappropriate utterances” is something they’ve never done before is just a teensy bit misleading. The fact is that they professionalized this stuff a very long time ago:
[A] BBC documentary titled Digging the Dirt … was filmed during the 2000 campaign and never aired in the United States. The film centers on a team of Republican opposition researchers —a species that has existed in politics for eons but had recently undergone an evolutionary leap. From deep within the Republican National Committee headquarters the BBC tracked the efforts of this team, whose job it was to discredit and destroy Al Gore.
Political campaigns always attempt to diminish their opponents, of course. What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls “votes and quotes”—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival’s legislative record and public statements. Comstock’s taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton’s top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. “The team we had from 2000,” she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, “were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys.”
Comstock combined a prosecutor’s mentality with an investigator’s ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative “storyline” about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. “A campaign is a lot like a trial,” Comstock explained. “You want people aggressively arguing their case.”
Maligning an opponent, even with his own words and deeds, is a tricky business; voters take a dim view of “negative” politics, and are liable to punish the campaign carrying out the attacks rather than the intended target. Digging the Dirt provides a rare glimpse of how political operatives have learned to use the media to get around this problem, by creating a journalistic black market for damaging stories. During the first debate between Gore and Bush, in October of 2000, the BBC crew stationed itself inside the RNC’s war room, filming researchers as they operated with the manic intensity of day traders, combing through every one of Gore’s statements for possible misstatements or exaggerations. The researchers discovered two (Gore erroneously claimed never to have questioned Bush’s experience, and to have accompanied a federal official to the site of a Texas disaster), and immediately Tim Griffin tipped off the Associated Press. Soon the filmmakers would catch the team exulting as the AP took the story.
And it went both ways:
During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC’s Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material.