by Alan Huffman
In our experience, both inexperienced, unwary candidates and seasoned elected officials sometimes fall for the lure of questionable opportunities, for different reasons—one, because they’re politically naïve, and the other, because they’ve grown complacent or arrogant. Learning about local communities helps us understand how a deed that would go unnoticed in one place will play big in another. In the Deep South, where manners are part of the local currency, being impolite may be more damaging than whatever rude detail you have to relate. A lot hinges on how the campaign delivers the news, if the campaign chooses to do so at all.
What’s different about legitimate opposition research, as opposed to unfounded attack campaigns, is its factual basis and how the results come into play. Some campaigns may simply assign an intern or a volunteer to do perfunctory document reviews, then put the information out there for public consumption, but in the best cases the results of more exhaustive research are used to craft a cohesive, factual, negative storyline about the opposing candidate, and meanwhile to prepare for whatever negative storyline the opponent may craft about you. Everything, including the opponent’s and your defense, is framed within that context. It’s not so different from watching the video of your adversary in a boxing match, or a football game, to identify his strengths and weaknesses. Portray your political opponent as a liar, based on one documented event, and it’s possible to throw everything into doubt.
Michael and I cling to the belief that if the truth is revealed it will prevail, but it doesn’t always work that way. An elected official can repeatedly claim that he fought in Vietnam, when he didn’t, and be reelected. Opposition research, even when it succeeds, sometimes fails. The fruit goes bad after it’s picked or for whatever other reason just doesn’t sell. One need look no further than Mississippi in 1983. As remarkable as the events of the state’s gubernatorial election that year were, the outcome was even more stunning. Due to public revulsion over the conservative businessmen’s attacks, the candidate—a white attorney general who’d been accused of having sex with black transvestites in a Bible Belt state with a notoriously conflicted racial history—won. Here was a cautionary tale about how wrong opposition research can go—how badly the practice can be abused and how utterly it can backfire.
Admittedly, some things were different then. The idea of attacking a candidate’s personal life went against the tenor of the times, and the public’s distaste over this violation of decorum seems dated today. People were also more easily shocked then than they are now, which is why the prurient nature of the attack made them feel as if their own privacy had been invaded. Yet the businessmen’s attack campaign, and their candidate’s inevitable embrace of it, broke a host of rules that still apply. One is that despite the bewildering success of sensationally false allegations in the blogosphere and on cable news today, it’s still a good rule of thumb to avoid using hookers as your star witnesses—particularly if you also paid for their services, for whatever it was you were into (in this case you just wanted them to talk, which had no doubt been the case before). Second, it’s always a good idea to make sure you can satisfy media scrutiny and that you have the immediate support of your own candidate. You want to control the story from the outset. There can be no questions about anyone’s commitment to it. It’s crucial to ensure that you, not the subject of the attack, will be the recipient of public sympathy. There are many routes to accomplish this, all of which involve knowing—for real—that the damnable thing you’re about to say about someone is true, that it matters and that it can be proved.
If the voters decide to elect the guy anyway, you have no choice but to move on. That’s democracy.
Chapter 16
Michael
Given that the purpose of our work is to influence elections, you might think that one of its rewards would be the smug satisfaction that comes from watching an effective campaign commercial that’s based on our research. Maybe we’d be sitting in a bar, drinking with friends, when an attack ad comes on the big screen, one for which we’ve laid the groundwork. We’d raise our hands, silencing everyone, and watch, rapt, as the soothing yet forceful voice of the narrator proceeds to ream our opponent a new orifice, based on true facts that we uncovered through days of dogged research and hours behind the wheels of low-horsepower, poorly sprung rental cars. The ad would be our splashy trophy ride. High fives, and a beer for everybody at the bar.
And yet. One of the quirks of our job is that Alan and I rarely see how our research is used. We never experience those great bar moments. Sure, we may come across a few bits and pieces—perhaps a TV ad, if it airs in our viewing area or comes up on YouTube, or a news release forwarded to us by one of our campaigns—but by the time the campaign season enters its final stretch, we’ve moved on. We turn our attention to other projects and monitor the campaigns from afar, much like any other voter.
One difference is that we don’t just find the onslaught of campaign ads generally annoying, as most Americans do. Our audits don’t stop after we receive our last campaign check. If we do watch those ads, whether they’re aired on behalf of our candidates, their opponents or anyone running for office anywhere, it’s with an informed yet jaundiced eye. We’re keen for subtle distortions of the truth and outright lies, both of which are remarkably common.
Having done this since the early nineties, we’ve observed that during the last two congressional election cycles the attacks have become more pervasive and brutal, but more importantly, they rely less and less on documented facts. More money was spent on negative political ads during the 2010 midterm elections campaign than ever before, but few of the ads offered clues about their documentation. Because of that, it’s hard to know for sure whether ads are becoming more or less truthful, but there’s no question that many play fast and loose with far-brought, dear-bought facts.
For years I’ve associated campaign season—and the bombardment of early-fall ads it brings—with the state fair. They occur at about the same time and so I’ve always had a tendency to link the two. Growing up in Dallas, I had the largest state fair in the world basically in my backyard, and every year, one of the souvenirs my family came home with was a box of saltwater taffy. To watch it being made is an amazing process, with the baroque mechanizations of the taffy puller—three bars that rotate sequentially, stretching the looping taffy round and round. You first boil together all the necessary ingredients: sugar, butter, various flavorings and coloring (there is no actual salt water). This boiled concoction is stretched and pulled and stretched and pulled over and over again. Once it becomes fluffy enough, it’s rolled, cut into bite-size pieces and wrapped in wax paper. Though the taffy looks tempting and tastes great, it is notoriously bad for your teeth. And too much can leave you feeling vomitous.
Campaign ads are often nothing more than political taffy. The ingredients—the facts gathered by researchers such as Alan and me—are mixed together and prepared for the machine. The media experts who create and produce the TV ads stretch and pull this concoction of information to its breaking point, and sometimes beyond. It’s then cut into thirty- and sixty-second spots and presented to voters for their viewing consumption. They can be tasty for sure, but their nutritional value to an electoral diet is typically minimal. And if you’re the one who churned the butter, refined the sugar and eagerly watched the process from beyond the window, you’re likely to be disappointed.
When these ads are stretched too far, whether by sloppiness or by design, it’s even more disheartening for us. Then the ads we watch can seem downright sinister, and we’re liable to suffer a temporary loss of faith in the process in which we participate. We see errors, oversimplifications and outright fabrications. After all, people like us put in a lot of time to find the truth. Where did it go?
In one congressional campaign on which we worked, the opponent ran an ad that began with an empty overstuffed chair—the kind congressmen sit in during the session—to signify our candidate’s supposedly poor attendance record and l
ow success rate in getting bills through Congress. The point of the ad: Our guy wasn’t there for you. He did not represent you well.
The ad had just enough of the truth to pass for it. It cited the relatively small number of bills our candidate had passed, which was true as far as it went. But laws with a congressman’s name on them aren’t an accurate measure of a congressman’s success. Many of our guy’s bills had been incorporated into other bills that were subsequently passed, without the original sponsor’s name. In fact, he had an acceptable attendance record and did pass his share of legislation. When he spoke up about the ad, the opponent didn’t back down. The truth had slipped off the screen, and the opponent saw no reason to retrieve it. The empty chair—an empty prop, no doubt borrowed from some media agency’s stock photos—had served him well. Fortunately, the opponent lost anyway.
Voters often say they don’t like all the negative campaigning, but liking isn’t really the point. Would campaigns air so many attack ads if they didn’t possess the potential to work? It’s about impact, recollection, reinforcement, changing minds and getting people to the polls. Studies have reached many conclusions in that regard. They have shown that people who watch and remember negative ads are more likely to vote. They have shown that negative ads are more memorable than positive ads when they reinforce a preexisting belief, that the impact of negative ads increases over time and that positive ads aired as countermeasures lack the same power. Negative ads can increase political participation particularly among those with the least amount of political knowledge. That’s how you end up with an ad making the absurd (and, yes, untrue) claim that a senatorial candidate had supported taxpayer funding for Viagra for convicted child molesters.
The website FactCheck.org is a great source for verifying the authenticity of many ads and campaign claims. The trouble is, most voters don’t fact-check, even when someone else has done all the legwork. In one case cited on the FactCheck website, a former New York governor’s political group had made false claims in ads attacking Democrats over health care reform. The group launched two nearly identical ads criticizing Democrats in New Hampshire and New York for voting for the new health care law. The ad made several false and unsubstantiated claims, according to FactCheck, including that the law creates “longer waits in doctors’ offices” and that “your right to keep your own doctor may be taken away.” The group said those claims were about a Medicare payment program that the law calls for establishing, but it cited an opinion piece that doesn’t make those claims at all.
The actual author of that opinion piece told FactCheck that it was “bogus” to cite his article as support for the ad. Even when an ad cites supposed documentation, it may be untrue, regardless of which party or group airs it. The ad also falsely called the health care law “government-run health care,” when, in reality, the legislation will expand regulation of the insurance industry but build on the current private health care system and expand business for private insurers.
The group behind the ad, with the evocative name Revere America, is a 501(c)(4) organization, which means it doesn’t have to disclose its donors. Revere America told FactCheck that it hoped to spend “several million” before Election Day in 2010.
Likewise, a slate of ads from the American Crossroads “super PAC” attacking Senate candidates in Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, Nevada, Missouri and New Hampshire made numerous misleading or false claims. One described an incumbent as having been “the deciding vote” on health care, though he was one of sixty senators who supported it. An Illinois ad misused a newspaper headline to imply that an incumbent was at fault for the loss of millions in a college investment fund, and a New Hampshire ad accused an incumbent of voting for projects that weren’t even mentioned in the stimulus bill he supported. You get the picture. According to FactCheck, the American Crossroads PAC funded the ads under new regulations allowing unlimited contributions from individuals, unions and corporations.
“Distortions, stretches, half-truths and omissions are familiar features of political campaigns,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer observed on October 5, 2008. “But independent fact-checkers and analysts say that outright falsehoods in candidates’ ads may be reaching a level not seen since TV commercials entered presidential politics as the primary pipeline to voters in 1952.” This meshes with what we’ve noticed, and it’s happening, according to the article, “because false advertising works, because there are few, if any, penalties for it and because truth becomes a relative and disputable term in the alternate reality of partisan politics.” In some cases, the Plain Dealer allowed, it is also happening because, as Seinfeld character George Costanza said, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
To its credit, the Plain Dealer, in partnership with other Ohio newspapers, meticulously fact-checked all presidential campaign ads running on television in the state. In the three months before the article’s publication, the newspaper rated each ad on a 0–10 scale based on its truthfulness, whether it told the whole story, its fairness and its substance. At the time, the average score for “truthiness” for both campaigns was below a 5: The McCain campaign was 3.6, while the Obama campaign was 4.9. Eight McCain ads had received a zero rating, compared with one for Obama.
The Plain Dealer reported that PolitiFact.com, a project of Congressional Quarterly and the St. Petersburg Times, rated forty-seven McCain ads and statements as ranging from “barely true” to “pants on fire” false, compared with thirty for Obama (McCain had six ads in the “pants on fire” category; Obama had one). “Two McCain ads drew particular notice from fact-checkers,” the Plain Dealer noted. “One said Obama’s ‘one accomplishment’ was ‘legislation to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergartners’—misrepresenting his support for teaching them about inappropriate touching by adults, and understating his record.” Alan and I couldn’t help but wonder how the researchers who gleaned what may have seemed like telling details from Obama’s legislative record felt when the ad aired. Maybe they didn’t care, but we definitely would have.
A number of nonpartisan websites systematically fact-check political ads, statements and campaign e-mails, including FactCheck.org, of the Annenberg Public Policy Center; PolitiFact.com; Fact Checker of the Washington Post; and the New York Times. Top sites for fact-checking e-mails are Snopes.com and UrbanLegends.about.com. Remarkably, some people believe that the actual fact-checkers are lying—that the process of vetting facts is itself part of a political conspiracy. Typical of this view was a reader post on the FreeRepublic.com website concerning FactCheck.org: “For the most part, they are just another extension of Democrat media bias.” Others claimed that because Obama was ruled factually accurate more often than McCain, the fact-checkers themselves were clearly in his service. One post stated, “Factcheck.org is unquestionably a pro-Obama site. They even claim to have proof that Obama was born in the USA.” You get the idea.
The Washington Post said in a 2008 front-page story that after becoming fed up over claims and falsehoods by the McCain campaign, including that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had said “thanks but no thanks” to the so-called bridge to nowhere, the Obama campaign broke a taboo and used the “L-word of politics to say that the McCain campaign was lying.” That may have been true, but because it’s impossible to prove intentional deception in such a case, calling the claim a lie was itself a stretch, according to the Plain Dealer article. Sigh.
Whatever the intent or term, false and negative political ads often work very well, and there’s no one to regulate misleading claims, which is significant when more money is being spent on negative ads than ever before, and when the government has relaxed requirements to identify who’s paying for them. By the time the ads begin to air, Alan and I are sitting mute at the bar. Candidates are no longer much concerned with media or public backlash, and, according to the Plain Dealer article, studies have shown that debunking falsehoods can actually reinforce them through repetition.
People screen out facts that run count
er to broad narratives they accept, and they perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs, said science writer Farhad Manjoo, who writes about the phenomenon in his book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. “Indeed, you can go so far as to say we’re now fighting over competing versions of reality,” Manjoo wrote. “And it is more convenient than ever before for some of us to live in a world built out of our own facts.”
By rebutting untruths, meanwhile, “a candidate departs from his own message and can risk being seen as weak or complaining,” the Plain Dealer wrote. “Crazily enough, candidates have a legal right to lie to voters. The Federal Communications Commission requires broadcasters to run ads uncensored, even if the broadcasters believe they are false, and the Federal Election Commission deals with campaign finances, not ads.” According to the article, Ohio has the toughest truth-in-political-advertising law in the nation, yet there are no fines or enforcement mechanisms.
Commercial companies are bound by restrictions that prevent them from making false claims about their products or those of their competitors. When they make such claims anyway, they do so at their peril, because they can be penalized by the Federal Trade Commission. Political candidates are not held to the same standard because their statements fall under the free speech protection of the First Amendment. Time magazine noted that certain states have attempted to establish their own standards for truth in political advertising, but without much success. Washington State passed a law in 1984 that made it illegal to sponsor campaign commercials that knowingly “make a false statement of material fact.” Fines of up to $10,000 were possible for each instance, and violations could result in election outcomes being voided. “After fourteen years, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional, prompting one of the dissenting justices to complain that it was the first court in the history of the Republic to declare First Amendment protection for calculated lies,” Time wrote. Even the normally staid magazine observed that the lesson to be learned from the effectiveness of baseless political ads is, in this case, that the truth is for losers.
