# New low for McCain: Hires GOP Operative Who Helped Smear Him in South Carolina
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [September 4, 2008, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028 "2008-09-04T18:14:02Z")
**Posts on this page:** 16
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Polerius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polerius)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/1 "2008-09-04T18:14:02Z")
[McCain Hires GOP Operative Who Helped Smear Him in South Carolina in 2000](http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/09/mccain-hires-go.html)
Among the many lows in McCain’s descent from a “Maverick” to a brown-nose who is ready to compromise his ideals and do anything to get elected:
- He sucked up to Bush after losing the 2000 primaries, after terrible campaign tactics by Bush against him and his family
- He sucked up to religious conservatives during the 2008 primaries, people whom he had previously condemned.
- He started ad-hominem attacks on Obama, comparing him to Britney and Paris, an action which is more reminiscent of Republican-politics-as-usual than “Maverick”.
- He selected Palin over more qualified choices, to suck up to the “base”
But this latest fact (it’s a couple days old, but I haven’t seen it mentioned here) is mind-boggling. I cannot fathom how anyone would hire one of the people responsible for smearing you and your family so disgustingly.
I have lost all respect for McCain as a man of principles. There is no low to which he will not stoop to to get elected.
Does this, and related, pieces of news affect your opinion of McCain? (assuming you had a good opinion of McCain at some point)
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### Author:  [@Slacker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slacker)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/2 "2008-09-04T18:19:31Z")
It just makes me sad. 2000 McCain could have been a great president. It seems like 2008 McCain only has his name in common with the old “Maverick.”
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### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/3 "2008-09-04T18:21:08Z")
Eh. You have to do a lot of shit to get elected. Sometime you even have to pick a VP who said, just a few months ago, that you weren’t ready to be the president. If I made an issue of stuff like this, I’d never vote for anyone.
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### Author:  [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/4 "2008-09-04T18:31:00Z")
The South Carolina smear from 2000 is kind of a myth. What happened was that a telemarketing firm hired by Bush robocalled voters if they knew about the Keating five scandal and that McCain had compared Bush to Clinton. At the same time someone not affiliated with the Bush campaign started an email chain letter that said McCain’s adopted daughter was the product of an interracial affair.
A twelve year old heard rumors about the email smear and after listening to one of the robocalls and went crying to his mother upset over someone attacking his hero. The mother thought that the smear about the child was part of the robocall and asked McCain about it at a campaign event. The press picked up on it, and a myth was born.
The robocalls that the newly hired operative was involved with were negative, but they raised a totally legitimate issue, and if McCain refused to work with him because of them that would be very petty and vindictive.
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### Author:  [@Polerius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polerius)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/5 "2008-09-04T18:32:53Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#):
>
> Eh. You have to do a lot of shit to get elected. Sometime you even have to pick a VP who said, just a few months ago, that you weren’t ready to be the president.
There’s shit and then there’s _shit_.
It’s one thing to select for VP someone who said you weren’t ready for president, but it’s a whole different category to hire on your campaign someone who so disgustingly smeared you in a previous campaign (and, by all accounts, left a scar on McCain and his wife).
Surely there has to be a threshold of shit beyond which you do not excuse it.
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### Author:  [@Polerius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polerius)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/6 "2008-09-04T18:33:57Z")
> [@puddleglum](#):
>
> The South Carolina smear from 2000 is kind of a myth. What happened was that a telemarketing firm hired by Bush robocalled voters if they knew about the Keating five scandal and that McCain had compared Bush to Clinton. At the same time someone not affiliated with the Bush campaign started an email chain letter that said McCain’s adopted daughter was the product of an interracial affair.
> A twelve year old heard rumors about the email smear and after listening to one of the robocalls and went crying to his mother upset over someone attacking his hero. The mother thought that the smear about the child was part of the robocall and asked McCain about it at a campaign event. The press picked up on it, and a myth was born.
> The robocalls that the newly hired operative was involved with were negative, but they raised a totally legitimate issue, and if McCain refused to work with him because of them that would be very petty and vindictive.
Do you have a cite?
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### Author:  [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/7 "2008-09-04T18:36:17Z")
> [@Slacker](#):
>
> It seems like 2008 McCain only has his name in common with the old “Maverick.”
Word is, senator McCain will [attempt to reclaim his maverickyness](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/03/AR2008090303693.html?hpid=topnews) tonight:
> [@](#):
>
> McCain will seek to recast the Republican Party’s brand in his own maverick image, staking his claim to the presidency on a depiction of himself as a political renegade in an attempt to overcome what he will paint as his opponent’s more ephemeral call for change.
It’d be nice to be able to [look at the GOP platform](http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/republican-national-convention-passes-2008/story.aspx?guid=%7B797C0680-D95F-4D85-AAF5-FBC9FE8B361C%7D&dist=hppr) to see what the renegade has wrought, but the pdf won’t download for me.
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### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/8 "2008-09-04T18:45:40Z")
You guys keep thinking you’re going to find that one thing that will flip people from McCain to Obama. This stuff is just silly. The link in the OP says that:
> [@](#):
>
> Eskew’s talent notwithstanding, he was loathed by McCain’s 2000 campaign team. When the media first reported push-poll phone calls from Voter/Consumer Research, a company hired by he Bush campaign, asking South Carolinians if they knew about McCain’s role in the S&L crisis and his scandal as a member of the Keating Five, it was Eskew – Bush’s South Carolina spokesman – who acknowledged, and defended, the calls.
Well, McCain needed to answer to that then, and he’s going to have to answer to it again this year. It’s not uncommon for posters here to bring up the Keating Five scandal. If McCain was pissed about it in 2000, then he was being an idiot. That’s politics, and you can expect your opponent to bring up stuff like that all the time.
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### Author:  [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/9 "2008-09-04T19:39:38Z")
Is this the guy behind the “illegitimate black baby” stuff?
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### Author:  [@Polerius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polerius)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/10 "2008-09-04T20:16:10Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#):
>
> You guys keep thinking you’re going to find that one thing that will flip people from McCain to Obama.
I don’t think something like this will flip anyone’s vote. Why do you think these threads are meant to change peoples’ votes? I just saw the news, it disgusted me, and I wanted to see if peoples’ opinion of McCain has changed. You can be voting for Obama and still have a good opinion of McCain. Or, you can be voting for McCain, due to the issues he supports, and have a bad opinion of him.
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### Author:  [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/11 "2008-09-04T20:30:45Z")
> [@Polerius](#):
>
> Do you have a cite?
From an article by Byron York in the April 2004 national review.
> [@](#):
>
> The Bush campaign had hired an out-of-state company to make about 200,000 “advocacy” calls to voters. After McCain’s criticism, the campaign released the script of those calls. The script said Bush was “working hard and stressing his message of reform with results.” It went on to say, “Unfortunately, the race has turned ugly,” and urged listeners, “Don’t be misled by McCain’s negative tactics.” It ended with more positive words about Bush. There was no mention of cheats or liars or frauds.
>
> Nearly a week after McCain’s initial accusations, the Los Angeles Times looked into the matter. The paper found voters who had received the “advocacy” calls, but none who had received a call like the one described by Duren. “The McCain campaign has provided the names of only six voters complaining about calls from the Bush side,” the paper said. Of the voters the Times’s reporters could reach, “three described questions that, while negative, appear to have been part of a legitimate poll. Another said she heard no negative information at all.” The paper found no one who supported Duren’s accusation.
>
> The lack of evidence, while not proof that the call story was untrue, is nevertheless telling. Republican strategists point out that in controversies over mass callings, there has almost always been a tape of the calls, usually made by the answering machines of voters who received them. When Pat Robertson made a negative call on Bush’s behalf in Michigan, for example, the story ended up on the front page of the New York Times, because someone had a tape of it. Likewise, when the McCain campaign made its infamous anti-Bush “Catholic voter alert” calls in Michigan, there was taped evidence. But there was no such evidence of the “cheat/liar/fraud” calls.
>
> “If those calls took place, then where is the tape?” asks one GOP strategist. “You can’t make more than five phone calls and not have it end up on somebody’s answering machine. They’ve never been able to produce the individual who made the calls, they’ve never been able to produce the phone vendor who made the calls, and they’ve never been able to produce a script or a tape recording.”
>
> The same was true of rumors of other “push poll” calls that allegedly claimed that McCain had fathered an illegitimate mixed-race child. Although later commentary has simply accepted the existence of such calls as fact—in January of this year, National Public Radio’s Linda Wertheimer reported that “mysterious callers posing as pollsters asked voters how they felt about John McCain’s black child”—there is no hard evidence that the calls occurred.
>
> That is not to say there was no low-road campaigning. A Bob Jones University professor named Richard Hand, who had no connection to the Bush forces, sent out an e-mail containing a variety of charges against McCain, including the one that he had fathered illegitimate children. But in that case, there was evidence of the smear: the e-mail. Hand’s name quickly became public, and his message was discredited.
The pollster Stuart Rothenberg also wrote an article about it in when it happened in Roll Call, but their online archives don’t seem to go back that far.
The article in the Feb 16 2000 LA Times is only available online if you pay, but if you care to look for it, the writers are McManus and Pasternak.
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### Author:  [@Polerius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polerius)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/12 "2008-09-04T22:07:28Z")
> [@puddleglum](#):
>
> From an article by Byron York in the April 2004 national review.
>
> The pollster Stuart Rothenberg also wrote an article about it in when it happened in Roll Call, but their online archives don’t seem to go back that far.
> The article in the Feb 16 2000 LA Times is only available online if you pay, but if you care to look for it, the writers are McManus and Pasternak.
I’m a bit suspicious because the source you cite above is National Review, and I can’t access the other ones, but, if what you post above is true, it will be yet another amazing story of how an untrue meme survives many years and shapes peoples’ opinions without having any basis in fact.
I hate it when that happens.
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### Author:  [@Orbifold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Orbifold)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/13 "2008-09-04T22:19:18Z")
> [@Squink](#):
>
> Word is, senator McCain will [attempt to reclaim his maverickyness](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/03/AR2008090303693.html?hpid=topnews) tonight:
So basically he’s going to lie, no news there. Let’s face it, the “political renegade” McCain died, if he ever existed at all, when decided to kiss Falwell’s ring in 2006. Now there’s just a pandering whore animating his corpse.
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### Author:  [@Asimovian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asimovian)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/14 "2008-09-04T22:25:18Z")
> [@Polerius](#):
>
> I’m a bit suspicious because the source you cite above is National Review, and I can’t access the other ones, but, if what you post above is true, it will be yet another amazing story of how an untrue meme survives many years and shapes peoples’ opinions without having any basis in fact.
I have no dog in this fight, but I did look up the LA Times article to see that it does, in fact, exist. I won’t reproduce the rather lengthy article in its entirety for copyright reasons, but I think this might be the relevant portion:
> [@LA Times article](#):
>
> What has happened in South Carolina is this: Last Thursday, a woman at a McCain rally in Spartanburg stood up and said her 14-year- old son had received a telephone call that described McCain as “a cheat and a liar and a fraud.”
>
> “He was push-polled,” the mother, Donna Duren, said, adding that her son was deeply upset because he considered McCain his hero. “I was so livid last night I couldn’t sleep.”
>
> Duren said she did not know who had made the call. But McCain, appearing visibly upset, denounced Bush and called on him to stop the practice.
>
> “I’m calling on my good friend George Bush to stop this now,” he told reporters.
>
> Bush, in turn, angrily denied the charge. “I don’t accept that kind of phone calling,” he told reporters in Fort Lawn, S.C. “If anybody in my campaign has done that, they’re going to be fired. I agree with the senator that this kind of politics shouldn’t be a part of the political process.”
>
> Bush aides then released the scripts of two kinds of telephone calls their campaign has paid for: “advocacy calls,” urging voters to support Bush, and polling calls.
>
> The advocacy scripts were bland and positive, stressing Bush’s campaign message without slamming McCain.
>
> The polling script, by contrast, includes several questions that involve negative information about the senator from Arizona. But both Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer and a spokesman for the polling firm said those questions were asked of only 300 voters–a number characteristic of a legitimate poll, not a push poll.
>
> The wording of the questions is far from neutral and, in some cases, distorts McCain’s record. The questions are similar in tone and content to the highly partial phrasing of negative radio and television campaign ads.
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### Author:  [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)
#### Post date: [September 4, 2008, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/15 "2008-09-04T22:51:40Z")
McCain himself certainly seems to believe the whisper campaign about his daughter actually happened.
> [@](#):
>
> Dadmag: During your campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination Bridget became something of an issue in South Carolina didn’t she?
>
> McCain: Yeah. There were some pretty vile and hurtful things said during the South Carolina primary. It’s a really nasty side of politics. We tried to ignore it and I think we shielded her from it. It’s just unfortunate that that sort of thing still exists As you know she’s Bengali, and very dark skinned. A lot of phone calls were made by people who said we should be very ashamed about her, about the color of her skin. Thousands and thousands of calls from people to voters saying “You know the McCains have a black baby” I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those.
[http://www.dadmag.com/archive/060400jmccain.php](http://www.dadmag.com/archive/060400jmccain.php)
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### Author:  [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)
#### Post date: [September 5, 2008, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-low-for-mccain-hires-gop-operative-who-helped-smear-him-in-south-carolina/462028/16 "2008-09-05T18:03:45Z")
> [@Polerius](#):
>
> I’m a bit suspicious because the source you cite above is National Review, and I can’t access the other ones, but, if what you post above is true, it will be yet another amazing story of how an untrue meme survives many years and shapes peoples’ opinions without having any basis in fact.
>
> I hate it when that happens.
To paraphrase the Rothenberg piece, he makes the point that no one would bother to push poll someone too young to vote. Also that if it was a recorded message, it would be preserved on answering machines, and that while these phone calls were supposedly to thousands of McCain supporters only one person has ever claimed to have received one.