Among my youthful indiscretions was time spent as a Young Republican. Worse yet, I was a member of Youth for Nixon in 1968. I know, but that's what Purgatory is for, isn't it? The local Nixon campaign encouraged me to engage in a campaign dirty trick, follow me below the fold for more.
The setup is this, our locality was to be honored with a visit by the wannabe first daughter, Julie Nixon. She was to speak in a parking lot in back of the row of buildings which held our store front office. A very typical campaign setting.
Reflecting the paranoia of the Nixonian organization, the county coordinator was concerned that the press would find some way to create a bad impression of Ms. Nixon. Specifically, the same group of storefronts housed the offices of The American Information Library. This was the home, in other words, of the local branch of the John Birch Society. (Our local newspaper publisher was a BIG supporter of their anti-flouridation campaign. See Republicans have hated science for a long, long time.) The coordinator was concerned that if Julie was photographed from a particular angle, the AIF sign would appear in the background, tarring her and her father with the John Bircher image.
His solution was to have a group of eager Youth for Nixon volunteers vandalize the sign. Specifically, we filled some balloons with red paint. Then late at night (about 9 PM, hey we had a curfew.) we threw them at the sign to obscure it and drove madly away in my best friend's Ford Fairlane Convertible.
BTW, in light of the poll below, I gained my sanity before I was eligible to vote and rarely, if ever, have voted for a Republican.