I'm using my diary today to respond to ElitistJohn - see his diary entry,
here - and others who have loudly accused other campaigns of "slimey" and "dirty" tricks.
I come from the era in which "dirty tricks" meant McCarthy blacklists and Nixon enemies lists, ruined lives and IRS audits on political opponents, so I'm, needless to say, underwhelmed by the claims of internecine "dirty tricks" this year between Democratic candidates, and see them as akin to crying over spilled milk.
ElitistJohn complains about something that happened in a small Democratic Club in Washington DC (at worst, the Dean people left early and therefore opened themselves up to being outmaneuvered there, and, in any case, ElitistJohn jumps to a huge unsubstantiated conclusion to blame it on John Kerry). Someone else recently complained that she got a cell phone call from the Kerry campaign (excuse me if I'm underwhelmed). I've yet to see anything that rises to the level of what I would define as dirty tricks. And in fact, after months of reading "Joe Trippi is a Jedi" around here, I want to know what the difference is between what Trippi did to Alan Cranston in this TNR passage and the maneuvers this year by various campaigns. I think people are "crying wolf" and, frankly, I think the Democratic Nominee is going to have play very rough with Bush... "Outmaneuvering" does not equal a dirty trick. Here's the TNR passage for your review and commentary...
From
The New Republic, November 10, 2003...
Everyone tells their own version of how Walter Mondale won the straw poll at Iowa's Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in 1983, but they all go something like this: In early October, a young Mondale aide named Joe Trippi shows up in Des Moines to check on Mondale's Iowa field operation. What he finds there horrifies him. Somehow the Iowa team has allowed the rival campaign of California Senator Alan Cranston to nearly corner the market on tickets to the JJ dinner, an annual affair designed to raise money for the Iowa state Democratic Party. This is, to colossally understate things, a problem. The dinner's traditional straw poll is an important barometer of public opinion in the state that hosts the nation's first caucuses. Mondale is a former vice president from neighboring Minnesota. Not only is he expected to win the straw poll; he is expected to win big. But the way you win is by packing the convention hall full of your own supporters. And the way you do that is by selling them tickets or buying tickets for them.
Trippi is nearly hysterical when he calls Campaign Manager Bob Beckel and Deputy Manager Mike Ford in Washington. "He speaks so fast, it was hard to keep up," Beckel recalls. "I said, 'Joe, What's the bottom line? What do you need?' He said, 'I just need permission to do whatever I need to do.' ... I just said OK." But there isn't a lot Trippi can do. He can try to get the Iowa Democratic Party to sell him more tickets. But there's no way they're going to sell him $275,000 worth, which is what Trippi estimates Cranston has bought. And, even if they would, there's no way he can afford to drop that kind of cash on an off-year event. When it comes down to it, Trippi is going to have to get his hands on tickets that have already been sold. Cranston tickets. Lots of them. And yet, once he accepts that proposition, the solution is almost elegant in its simplicity: What's to stop him from just marching right up to Cranston's people and asking for them?
"We started really early in the day," Trippi remembers, reflecting on how he and an Iowa colleague named Tom Cosgrove solved their JJ problem. "They stopped about three miles out [from] the staging area--the Mondale buses coming from Minnesota or wherever they were coming from." What follows is one of the most ambitious political makeovers in history. A team of Mondale aides, led by Cosgrove, plasters the bus with Cranston paraphernalia--stickers, posters, buttons, everything. Three miles down the road, the bus pulls up to the Cranston tent, where a Mondale/Cranston supporter gets out and tells a real Cranston aide he has 52 people on the bus. The aide looks up at the bus, surely admiring the military-like discipline that has brought a busload of Cranston supporters from "Los Angeles or wherever" out to the middle of Iowa this early in the day, and quietly congratulates himself. He promptly hands over 52 tickets.
And it continues like this, through bus after bus of Mondale supporters: Stop three miles up the highway, lather the bus in Cranston paraphernalia, drive on to the Cranston tent, claim your tickets. And the Cranston campaign just keeps forking them over. Happily. Hell, the more buses that show up, the more impressed the Cranston people are by their own handiwork. Never does it occur to them that these busloads of supporters aren't the genuine article. At least not until the real Cranston buses start showing up. "Twenty buses pull up, and they're out of tickets," Trippi says, still amused at the spectacle almost 20 years later. "More Cranston buses keep pulling up, and they don't have the tickets anymore." Score one for Walter Mondale...
I mean, Dean supporters largely cheered this article when it came out last November, and certainly cheered for many months when Trippi outmaneuvered Kerry and the others on every front until January.
I think to shout "dirty tricks" right now at stuff that is smaller-scale than the maneuver immortalized by this piece of campaign legend is overplayed, and sounds to me very ungracious, almost a form of denial. When you enter any competition (and a campaign is very much a competition) you have to go in with the idea that victory is never guaranteed. And losing does not always equal being a "victim." I don't see victims, so far, in this process. And I think it shows poor character to pronounce "we're victims" without evidence of real victimization.
And I frankly hope that the eventual Democratic nominee plays a lot rougher with Bush than anyone has yet played in the primaries, because we already know what the illigitimate Court Appointed President is capable of doing to steal an election.