The Dirty War Moves South

Sunday may be a day of rest, but not for the political dirty tricksters. When Mike Huckabee emerged from the Cornerstone Family Church in Des Moines on the Sunday before the Iowa caucuses, he found that someone had papered the cars in the suburban megachurch's parking lot with fliers asking, MIKE HUCKABEE—A 'TRUE' CONSERVATIVE? The leaflet accused the former Arkansas governor of, among other sins, releasing a convicted rapist who raped again (and murdered) and saying nice things about Bill Clinton. "Don't be fooled by that smooth voice," warned the flier. Credited to an anonymous group called the Lynchburg Christian Students for the Truth, the circular had been spotted first at Huckabee rallies in South Carolina in the fall. This time the flier listed an e-mail address: TruthonHuck@gmail.com. When NEWSWEEK e-mailed it to find out more information on the group, no one responded.

The flier was a fairly typical—and relatively benign—example of the trash flying around Campaign 2008. Huckabee has not been a particular victim; his foes have been slimed with much worse, sometimes from "independent" groups backing Huckabee. Evangelical Christians, or at least their fringe groups, seem to be especially practiced at anonymous smears (possibly for the same reason that the worst wars are often religious ones: sins are easier to forgive if you know that God is on your side). Dark arts are hardly new to politics, and dirty tricksters have always been inventive. In 1964, operatives working for the re-election of President Lyndon Johnson circulated a coloring book in which children could color pictures of LBJ's opponent, Barry Goldwater, wearing the robes of the Ku Klux Klan. But 2008 promises to be a banner year for gutter politics. "I think this will be the nastiest campaign we've seen in a long time," says Darrell West, a professor of political science at Brown University.

Technology serves as a force multiplier for crude partisan passion. Like many political junkies, West has been tracking the vicious e-mail traffic already swirling around the Internet, e-mails saying that Sen. Barack Obama is a Muslim who took his oath of office on a Qur'an or insinuating that former governor Mitt Romney's Mormonism is some kind of Devil worship. "Technology makes dirty tricks much easier," says West. "You can do it without leaving fingerprints." The candidates themselves can stay positive while relying on anonymous supporters to do the dirty work, he notes. Most voters see through the smears, but even swaying 5 percent of them can have an impact in a close election. A NEWSWEEK investigation suggests that political hit jobs are already rampant and likely to get worse. Some are done the old-fashioned way—anonymous fliers left on windshields or shoved under doors—and some, increasingly, by hard-to-track e-mails and automated phone calls.

The Bible-belt state of South Carolina, which votes Jan. 19 (Republicans) and Jan. 26 (Democrats), has a sorry record of smears. Cars outside churches on the Sunday before the GOP primary in 2000 were papered with fliers, sourced to an obscure Baptist group in Kentucky, questioning Sen. John McCain's sexuality and warning that a vote for McCain would be a vote for "McCain's Fag Army." The mud deepened: a flier distributed at McCain's final debate said that he'd fathered a "Negro child" out of wedlock; it used a photo of Bridget McCain, an orphan adopted years earlier by the senator's wife, Cindy, while she was on a relief mission in Bangladesh.

McCain tries to shrug off his smearing in 2000. He told NEWSWEEK: "It's behind me, and I don't think about it. People don't like sore losers." But just in case, his campaign has created a "truth squad" in South Carolina to mount a "rapid response" to any underhanded attacks and has manned a 24/7 war room of college students with laptops, on watch for Internet dirt on their candidate. The McCain campaign breathed a slight sigh of relief when Romney pulled his advertising from South Carolina to devote more resources to his effort in Michigan. Romney had hired Warren Tompkins as a South Carolina consultant. Known admiringly in the political trade as "the god of hell," Tompkins is legendary in the state as a disciple of the late Lee Atwater, an old Bush-family operative and perhaps the most renowned modern practitioner of campaign dark arts. The old Atwater attack machine may have been switched off, or at least turned down. Still, Tompkins, who has always denied authorship of the nastiest attacks on McCain in 2000, tells NEWSWEEK that he doubts the state's primary will suddenly become a model of civility. Many of South Carolina's evangelical leaders—who, Tompkins says, "self-generated" most of the 2000 attacks—have lined up with Huckabee and remain implacably opposed to McCain.

A favorite tactic of negative campaigning is the telephone "push poll"—a phone call in which pretend pollsters ask leading, sometimes false, questions to push voters for or against candidates. In the days before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, voters would pick up their ringing phones and hear an automated voice ask them which of several GOP candidates they supported. If, for instance, they answered "Rudy Giuliani," they'd hear a message reminding them that Giuliani is a supporter of abortion rights. If a voter indicated Mitt Romney, a series of questions would follow, asking if the voter wanted to back a former governor who had flip-flopped on core GOP issues like immigration. If the voter picked McCain, the robo-call machine would point out that McCain had sponsored legislation limiting campaign activities of anti-abortion activists. Sometimes the calls would end with a pitch for Mike Huckabee as the candidate who would cut taxes and close the borders.