My apologies if this has already been posted. Charles Lewis of the excellent Center for Public Integrity has the best run-down I've seen on the inexcusable "Dean = Osama" ads run late last year by "Americans for Jobs and Healthcare."
Lewis goes over the latest campaign records and gets to the bottom of the mystery, or at least as much as is possible given the lack of disclosure.
Aside from the ads being despicable -- Kerry might as well have hired Lee Atwater -- he points to the larger dangers posed by such organizations.
Political Mugging In America
Anatomy of an "independent" smear campaign
By Charles Lewis
(March 4, 2004) -- As Mark Twain once put it, "A truth is not hard to kill and a lie told well is immortal."
In the 21st century in the United States of America, it is still astonishingly easy to assassinate a political opponent's character, with little or no accountability or basis in fact. It is hardly new to politics anywhere that money and the messages it buys often create devastating perceptions. But such smear tactics are more serious and offensive when they benefit major "mainstream" candidates seeking the Presidency, are utilized anonymously by mysterious, outside organizations and they occur in the wake of recent, historic, campaign finance reform and new political disclosure requirements.
Today, Americans for Jobs released new disclosure forms to the IRS with an additional $337,000 bringing the 527's total receipts to $1 million.
On November 7, 2003, a strange new group no one had ever heard of called "Americans for Jobs & Healthcare" was quietly formed and soon thereafter began running a million dollar operation including political ads against then-frontrunner Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. The commercials ripped Dean over his positions or past record on gun rights, trade and Medicare growth. But the most inflammatory ad used the visual image of Osama bin Laden as a way to raise questions about Dean's foreign policy credibility. While the spots ran, Americans for Jobs--through its then-spokesman, Robert Gibbs, a former Kerry campaign employee--refused to disclose its donors.
The Dean campaign cried foul, but no one, including the news media, could figure out exactly who was behind "Americans for Jobs." The disturbing mystery was partly solved by Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post on February 11, after reviewing public Internal Revenue Service records filed under Section 527 of federal tax law. Unfortunately for voters and the general public, that legal disclosure information was filed January 30, 2004, nine days after the Iowa caucuses in which Massachusetts Senator John Kerry upset former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Those contribution records were updated again with another $337,000 in donations on March 4, 2004, for a total of exactly $1 million that the group raised.
The most stunning single fact to emerge--which should have been covered more heavily nationwide and was first broken by the Web site PoliticsNJ.com--was that disgraced former Senator Robert Torricelli, severely admonished for his unsavory campaign finance practices and forced to leave the Senate, had quietly donated $50,000 from his old Senate campaign account to Americans for Jobs. Torricelli reportedly also is a fundraiser for Senator Kerry's presidential campaign.
Why is one of the sleaziest former public officials helping Senator Kerry collect campaign cash? And now that Torricelli and other Kerry campaign donors have been "outed" for supporting the controversial group, why hasn't Kerry been directly asked about the entire controversy? Indeed, why hasn't the avowed campaign finance reformer publicly criticized either the caper or Torricelli? Kerry and his campaign staff declined to answer these and other related, on-the-record questions from the Center for Public Integrity. A Kerry spokesman, Chad Clanton, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that "I am told no one knew anything about it."
Read more at:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=557&L1=10&L2=10&L3=0&L4=0&
amp;L5=0