Once in a great while, an internal strategy memo or top-secret email will come to public light and give everyone a behind-the-scenes look at how political insiders operate.
Recently, staffers for Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) uncovered just such a document prepared by Washington GOP operatives planning to “destroy” the mild-mannered lawmaker in his home state.
This memo provides an invaluable look at the Republican destruction machine and how the GOP carefully and methodically smears those who gets in the way of the party’s agenda.
As Josh Marshall explains in today’s issue of The Hill, the campaign to discredit Daschle began almost two years ago, when GOP pollster Frank Luntz sent around a memo urging Republican lawmakers and allied activists to “Gingrich” Dashcle, who at the time was the Senate Majority leader.
“Remember what the Democrats did to Gingrich?” Luntz asked. “We have to do exactly the same thing to Daschle.”
Shortly thereafter, ultraconservative activist groups began taking out advertisements in South Dakota newspapers comparing Daschle to Saddam Hussein because Daschle opposed Bush’s oil drilling policy in Alaska. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) called Daschle a “rabid dog.” (What is it, exactly, with Santorum and canines?) House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Daschle had “come mighty close” to giving aid and comfort to the enemy because he criticized Bush over the war in Iraq. Rush Limbaugh wondered on-air if Daschle was quite literally the devil.
This personal destruction strategy evolved into the tactical memo recently obtained by the senator’s staff.
According to a report in the current issue of The New Republic, the GOP memo declares that the party should “destroy Daschle’s credibility” and “ultimately help end his public career.” The memo goes on to explain that the anti-Daschle campaign will need “a stiletto, not a sledgehammer,” meaning that the attacks will seem less vicious if executed “through humor.”
Specifically, the Republican strategy calls for raising $1 million from their fat-cat donors for a multi-media ad campaign featuring to folksy, fictional characters — Del and Hurley — who are portrayed as working in a South Dakota barbershop. The two will be shown in TV and billboard ads, for example, blasting Daschle and his policies in a “low-key, ‘Hee-Haw’-like rural tone,” according to the GOP memo, and “speak[ing] in subdued monotones with a slightly detectable hint of a Scandinavian accent. They show almost no emotion.”
The memo maps out an ad in which one of the characters complains that the government will take “half of what I got just because I died” because the mean, old Daschle didn’t vote to repeal the so-called “death tax.” As The New Republic explained, the ad is laughably dishonest. The current estate tax only applies to inheritances over $2 million and Daschle has voted to exempt all estates below $7 million. Unless Del and Hurley’s barbershop is “located atop a diamond mine,” the estate tax won’t bother their family fortune.
Of course, smear campaigns aren’t about truth, they’re about destroying.
The effort to besmirch Daschle won’t stop with just the Del and Hurley ads. Last week, a group of GOP operatives ran an ad in a South Dakota newspaper comparing Daschle to Iraq’s Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Hussein’s unintentionally-funny information minister.
More importantly, Daschle’s GOP critics have created fake activist organizations, or front groups, to disassociate the party in Washington from their tactics in South Dakota. In other words, they’re outsiders coming into the state to attack a local politician, but they’re also aware of the fact that to be effective, residents have to believe the anti-Daschle movement is generated by actual South Dakotans.
To that end, the national GOP has created something called the Rushmore Policy Council, which as The New Republic explained, is an outfit so small that it has no website or local telephone number. The group only exists “to put a phony local veneer on the GOP’s efforts to ruin its number-one enemy.”
It remains to be seen if the anti-Daschle campaign will be effective in South Dakota, where the senator will probably run for re-election next year. The state is solidly Republican — South Dakota hasn’t supported a Democratic presidential candidate in 40 years — but Daschle has done very well in every election since first winning his Senate seat nearly 18 years ago, beating his last two GOP rivals by a nearly 2 to 1 margin.
But the Republican attack machine is clearly focusing all of its attention on Daschle. The fact that the internal memo outlining the GOP strategy will probably force Daschle’s critics to come up with an entirely new approach doesn’t really matter; they’ll come up with something equally malicious.
Nevertheless, if I had to wager on Daschle’s re-election, I wouldn’t bet against him. I wonder what kind of odds I could get from Bill Bennett?