Dirty Tricks

Does South Carolina have a particularly bad reputation for dirty tricks?
It does, and it's probably well deserved because of the kind of stuff you see down there. It's rough stuff.

Can you explain the importance of "oppo research"?
Yeah, in fact that's how I got my start in politics. There are really two types of opposition research: there's what's called the vulnerability study; that's a study the candidates undertake upon themselves to figure out where their weaknesses are. And that's a tough one, because the candidate needs to be willing to go under the microscope. The other one is opposition research, and that can be as mundane as public records stuff—quotes in the paper, voting records—all the way to stuff that's a bit more personal or seedy or sordid. That can involve anything from culling library morgues to hiring a private investigator … Here's how this stuff works: it's hard to just dump a charge into the public domain. Those tend to not have the impact of a charge that is somehow salient to the campaign. So, to use an example, if a candidate is saying, "I'm the clean, green, environmentally friendly candidate," and they've got a toxic waste dump in their back yard, well, that's a potent hit. Because there's hypocrisy there. And that's what opposition research is really geared to do: to find inconsistencies and, more importantly, hypocrisies that can be used against the candidate.

Now, in the primary cycle, the various candidates are focused on rivals in their own party. How much oppo research do you think is going on now at the party level to prepare for the general election to come? Are the various party organizations starting to collect dirt on key opponents from the other parties?
The RNC [Republican National Committee] and the DNC embarked on that probably a year ago. That's the engine right there. That's where you manufacture all the potential issues that you can use.

Presumably they are storing up whatever opposition research they have. They wouldn't want to use it now, because they want to see who is going to win the nomi­nation. They'd want to use whatever they've stored up to use later in the process, correct?
Yeah. The parties' job is to get all the supplies ready for the nominee to march in and take over and do what they're going to do. And anyway, as you know, presidential campaigns are largely driven by you and your colleagues [in the press]. To some extent they're driven by paid advertising. But at the presidential level, that type of information is used to feed to the press to drive the story that way.

What was prison like?
It's not a pleasant place. When I was running campaigns, there were a lot of issues, and one of the issues I remember using was "tough on crime," "three strikes and you're out," the "no-frills prison act," which was designed not to replace equipment in prisons. For instance, the prisoners use weight equipment. The no-frills prison act means you can't repair this equipment when it breaks. What I realized was that all the stuff I used to use in campaigns affected real people. The other revelation I had was that we put way too many people in prison.

© 2008