Ever since the netroots' takedown of Ben Domenech's past a few months ago, I've had the idea that we Kossacks should collaberate together to search for any opposition research that we can find on Republican incumbents for the upcoming midterm elections as well as the 2008 presidential elections. I believe that this project that I'm proposing would help ease some of the tensions within the community once the Democratic primary season begins as well as reduce the level of criticism against Dkos by some members of our party who question the wisdom of supporting the primary challengers to Joe Lieberman et al.
I present my action plan on the other side....
During the Domenech/Washington Post debacle, I was simply amazed how well Kossacks worked together to expose Domenech's lies. Remember this diary where FleetAdmiralJ put together a comprehensive list of all the times that Ben D. plagiarized?
http://www.dailykos.com/...
It only took a week for Kossacks to gather enough evidence against BD to force him to resign/get fired from the Washington Post. Just think what we could do if we devoted that same level of energy (and intensity) in finding opposition research on incumbent Republican representatives and senators. We might be able to change the direction of some races and make them tighter if not winnable, if we are as successful in investigating these Congresspeople as we were in the BD case.
Here's my proposal. Why don't we investigate one Representative per week and one Senator per month for the next several months to see what we can find? We might not be successful in every case, but who knows? We might find something that a Democratic candidate could use in their campaign against that incumbent. Once we find something, I suggest that Kossacks who live in that incumbent's district/state, should write a letter to the editor of the local paper to create some buzz about the incumbent's problems. Maybe the Kossack could even call or write a letter to the representative/senator's office and ask them to respond to the Kossack's accusations? I'm weighing the costs and benefits of handing over the info that we collect to the Democratic candidate. I think it should be a grassroots effort which is why I'm reluctant to get the Democratic candidate involved. But at the same time, I don't want our involvement in any race to throw the candidate off message. I don't know. What do you think? Should we get the campaign involved in this effort?
After the midterms, we could do the same thing for potential Republican candidates. I would recommend John McCain as the first guy to go after, since he's such a media darling and they won't bother to investigate him. So we would be able to fill in the gap. As I said earlier, I think it would also help some of the tensions in the community during the Democratic primary season. If we're all working together on some project to defeat Republicans, then hopefully our collaberative efforts would reduce the personal conflicts that might arise when supporting our candidates in the primaries.
How do we go about doing it? First, we would have to decide who to target. I would suggest that we target incumbent Republicans--at least for now. I think it would be much easier to target incumbents because they have a longer paper trail than a Republican competing for an open seat. We could use the power of the netroots to dig up dirt on DINOs, but IMHO, I would prefer that we used our energy to defeat Republicans. Investigating Republican incumbents could be our response, when our critics asked us why we were devoting so many resources to defeating Democratic incumbents like Lieberman. We could tell our critics that we are allocating our resources in different ways. One way is to provide financial support to candidates like Lamont. Another way is to provide opposition research on Republicans to the media to help Democrats.
I would also suggest that we target races with so called second tier candidates. People might disagree with me on this part of the plan and I'm willing to take any suggestions. It's my feeling that the mainstream media is already focused on incumbent Republicans in "hot" campaigns like Santorum in the Pennsylvania Senate race. If not the media, then the DSCC and the DCCC will have their consultants conduct the oppo research for their top tier candidates. I think we should get involved in races where our investigation of the incumbent could make a real difference in the race. You know the races where our candidates are probably 10-15 percentage points down in the polls that Schumer and Emanuel have discounted already. If we could even make those races 5-10 percentage points down, I would declare it a win, esp if Republicans had to devote more resources to keep it in the leaning Republican column. I'm thinking of races like the one with Heath Schuler against the guy who voted down the 9/11 memorial in Pennsylvania.
Once we decide upon a candidate, we would then need to decide what type of opposition research we wanted to obtain against each incumbent and how would we go about doing it. At Borders, I recently came across a book called "Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management, Strategy & Tactics," which provides interesting tips on how to dethrone incumbents. "Winning Elections" edited by Ronald Faucheux http://www.amazon.com/... is an anthrology of several articles that were submitted by campaign consultants to the Campaigns and Elections journal. In this book's chapter "Opposition Research: The Power of Information," Rich Galen, a Republican campaign consultant, suggested a few ways that one can find oppo research.
First, he suggested that people look for lies in the resume. Kossacks did that brilliantly in the Ben Domenech case so no need to expand on those remarks. Galen then provides a list developed by political pollster Bill McInturff of the "7 Deadly Sins of Incumbency," which I think should be our starting point for the Kossack project:
1) First, we need to find out whether the incumbent cast any bad votes or missed any important votes in their last term.
Ex: We know that this campaign strategy works. Karl Rove used Kerry/Edwards' missed votes/appearance at meetings to portray them as absentee senators. 'Nuff said on that score.
2) Secondly, we should make it an issue whether the incumbent has taken foreign trips (or trips to exotic locales like Hawaii) at taxpayer's expense. I would also add given the Abramoff scandal, we should check into corporate sponsors of those trips as well.
I disagree with the next 2 "deadly sins that this Bill McInturff suggests: 3) voting for his/her own pay raise and 4) voting for new/higher taxes. This Bill person must be a Republican. I'm conflicted whether we should go after Republicans on voting for higher taxes. It might depress their voter turnout but it might hurt our side in the long run, if the Democratic opponent needs to pass some "revenue enhancement" measures.
5) The fifth deadly sin is for a representative/senator to not live in the district/state which they purportedly represent. Casey's campaign is using this deadly sin against Rick Santorum to good effect. I think this charge is pretty apt right now because so many people are disaffected with Congress. It makes it easier to charge the representative/senator that s/he is "out of touch" with his/her constituents if s/he lives in DC most of the time.
6) We should try to find a public scandal in the representative/senator's past. Funnily enough, Rich Galen says the following: "Unfortunately, public scandals for elected officials are hard to come by." For some reason, I don't think that we'll have that problem this year. Maybe we'll find some ties to the Abramoff/Duke Cunningham scandals, when we start our research? Or maybe there are other scandals just waiting to be discovered?
7) The final deadly sin we should try to uncover is whether a representative/senator has repeated any mistakes of the above 6 deadly sins all over again (despite reassurances and public promises never to commit the same acts again). Just think if we could find any scandal about McCain helping a corporate entity to bilk seniors of their savings (or something like that). Not only would the media devote several stories on the current scandal, but they would also rehash the old scandal as well.
The 7 deadly incumbent sins are a great place to start, but I also think we should look at what campaign promises the incumbent made in the past and compare it with their record. If the incumbent broke a promise, then we could make it a character issue. If the incumbent "flip flopped", then we could make it a character issue. Republicans love to make character attacks in campaigns. Why don't we do the same? "How can we trust incumbent X, if we can't rely on their word?" This could be fun. We could simply throw all the words we've heard about our candidates back in their faces when talking about their incumbents.
My last suggestion is that we should divide up the research project. Some people could perform simple google searches. Others could perform a Thomas search for votes and/or the Congressional Record. Still others could look up articles in local papers at this site:
http://www.ecola.com/...
I think this could be a worthwhile project. Please tell me if you think this is a good idea or not.