If so, what is the Democratic equivalent of these?:
Eight years ago this month, John McCain took the New Hampshire primary and was favored to win in South Carolina. Had he succeeded, he would likely have thwarted the presidential aspirations of George W. Bush and become the Republican nominee. But Bush strategist Karl Rove came to the rescue with a vicious smear tactic.
Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”
…
Seven years later, who is running McCain’s South Carolina campaign? Charlie Condon, the former State Attorney General who in 2000 helped spread the innuendo targeting Bridget. If you can’t beat them, hire them–even if they’ve launched racist attacks against your own daughter.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/banks
Seeking support in Northeast primary states, John McCain urged voters Saturday to reject attempts by “two Texas cronies of George W. Bush to hijack an election” with $ 2.5 million in new anti-McCain television ads.
“Tell 'em to keep their dirty money in the state of Texas, my friends,” Mr. McCain told a crowd at Copley Square in Boston. “Don’t spread it all over New England and America.”
http://www.boycottgreenmountain.com/mccain-ads-dallas.html
The battle between Bush and McCain for South Carolina has entered American political lore as one of the nastiest, dirtiest, and most brutal ever. On the one hand, Bush switched his label for himself from “compassionate conservative” to “reformer with results”, as part of trying to co-opt McCain’s popular message of reform. On the other hand, a variety of business and interest groups that McCain had challenged in the past now pounded him with negative ads.
The day that a new poll showed McCain five points ahead in the state, Bush allied himself on stage with a marginal and controversial veterans activist named J. Thomas Burch, who accused McCain of having “abandoned the veterans” on POW/MIA and Agent Orange issues: “He came home from Vietnam and forgot us.” Incensed, McCain ran ads accusing Bush of lying and comparing the governor to Bill Clinton, which Bush complained was “about as low a blow as you can give in a Republican primary.” An unidentified party began a semi-underground smear campaign against McCain, delivered by push polls, faxes, e-mails, flyers, audience plants, and the like. These claimed most famously that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains’ dark-skinned daughter Bridget was adopted from Bangladesh; this misrepresentation was thought to be an especially effective slur in a Deep South state where race was still central), but also that his wife Cindy was a drug addict, that he was a homosexual, and that he was a “Manchurian Candidate” traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days. The Bush campaign strongly denied any involvement with these attacks; Bush said he would fire anyone who ran defamatory push polls. During a break in a debate, Bush put his hand on McCain’s arm and reiterated that he had no involvement in the attacks; McCain replied, “Don’t give me that shit. And take your hands off me.”
Bush mobilized the state’s evangelical voters, and leading conservative broadcaster Rush Limbaugh entered the fray supporting Bush and going on at length about how McCain was a favorite of liberal Democrats. Polls swung in Bush’s favor; by not accepting federal matching funds for his campaign, Bush was not limited in how much money he could spend on advertisements, while McCain was near his limit. With three days to go, McCain shut down his negative ads against Bush and tried to stress a positive image. But McCain’s stressing of campaign finance reform, and how Bush’s proposed tax cuts would benefit the wealthy, did not appeal to core Republicans in the state.
McCain lost South Carolina on February 19, with 42 percent of the vote against Bush’s 53 percent, allowing Bush to regain the momentum.
He’s America’s Joseph Goebbels. As a 21-year old Young Republican in Texas, Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon’s chief political dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the incoming Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush. Rove’s dirty tricks on behalf of Nixon’s 1972 campaign catapulted Rove onto the national stage. From his Eagle’s Nest in the West Wing of the White House, Rove now directs a formidable political dirty tricks operation and disinformation mill.
Since his formative political years when he tried to paint World War II B-24 pilot and hero George McGovern as a left-wing peacenik through his mid-level career as a planter of disinformation in the media on behalf of Texas and national GOP candidates to his current role as Dubya’s “Svengali,” Rove has practiced the same style of slash and burn politics as did his Nixonian mentor Segretti. Many of us remember the Lincolnesque Senator Ed Muskie breaking down in tears during the 1972 campaign over Segretti-planted false stories in a New Hampshire newspaper that accused Mrs. Muskie of being a heavy smoker, drinker, and cusser and accused Muskie of uttering a slur in describing New Hampshire’s French Canadian population. Rove’s hero also forged letters on fake Muskie campaign letterhead, disrupted rallies and fundraising dinners, and spread false stories about the sex lives of candidates. Segretti’s brush also smeared George McGovern, George Wallace, Shirley Chisholm, and McGovern’s first vice presidential choice, Senator Tom Eagleton. Segretti of course did not go on to a high-level White House job – he was sentenced to six months in federal prison for distributing illegal campaign material.
