THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter
Some straight-talkin' maverick, this John McCain -- a pol who's dependent on one of the GOP's most familiar gunslinger-lobbyists whose peculiar political ethics once helped design and construct the party's modern seek-and-destroy machine.
Then, as now, that machine delivered precious little straight talk and the only thing "maverick" about it was how ethically low it was willing to operate. And one of its co-designers was Charlie Black, whose most recent association with Mr. McCain is summarized here [1] by the New York Times:
When Senator John McCain’s campaign was collapsing last summer, it was Charlie Black who set the comeback strategy. When conservative opposition threatened to derail Mr. McCain just as he was surging again this winter, it was Charlie Black who called prominent conservatives to secure their backing. And when Mr. McCain was finally the last man standing, it was Charlie Black who engineered the campaign’s takeover of the Republican National Committee.
All pretty straightforward stuff; nothing untoward there, for sure. But when one travels farther into Mr. Black's past, it is then that his surname begins to take on a bit more symbolic meaning -- for instance, "he cut his teeth on Jesse Helms's campaigns." Given the context, the trope should have been altered to read, "fangs."
But it was this passage from the Times that especially caught my attention and provided, perhaps, a historical preview of what the nation is in for throughout the general election:
In 1975, Mr. Black and two other young conservatives, Roger Stone and Terry Dolan, founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which set a new standard for negative advertising with its campaigns against six liberal senators in 1980, portraying them as 'baby killers' for their support of abortion rights, cozy with Castro and soft on national defense.
A new standard? I'd love to know how many times, after researching the squalid history of "Nickpack," as it was commonly called, that the Times' reporter wrote "a new low," only to have her editor rewrite it in less subjective, less accurate language. Because the early cogs in the New Right's attack machine didn't operate any lower than those of Messrs. Black, Stone and Dolan's.
Most of the money they raised for Nickpack in the late 1970s and early '80s was funneled by direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie, who has since gone completely crazy and attacks pretty much everyone, whether left or right. Throughout 1979 and the first half of 1980 alone, for instance, Black, Stone and Dolan raked in more than $4 million of Viguerie-cash to conduct the negative campaign referenced above by the Times -- a campaign that Nickpack's chairman, Dolan, succinctly described to the Washington Post as one of simply "bugging the hell out of" their liberal opponents.
How did they do it? By lying, that's how. Against one of the six Democratic senators, for instance, Nickpack ran ads accusing him of "giving $75 million of taxpayers' money in aid to revolutionary government in Nicaragua" -- aid the senator had, in fact, voted against. It assailed another in TV ads for being able to "legally spend as much of his own money [on his campaign] as he wants -- and he's got millions" -- even though, as the Post pointedly corrected the record at the time, the candidate "had applied for matching funds and is therefore limited to spending $50,000 of his own money."
There were other famous examples of Nickpack's outright lies and distortions, yet no public corrections had any effect on its tactics. At the direction of Messrs. Black, Stone and Dolan, it went right ahead and continued blasting the airwaves with fraudulent garbage. And the results were instructive for the New Right. Of the six liberal senators targeted -- Frank Church, George McGovern, Alan Cranston, John Culver, Birch Bayh and Tom Eagleton -- four lost their seats: Church, McGovern, Culver and Bayh. A new public relations era for the GOP was dawning, one as wretchedly effective in operation as its red-baiting of the late 1940s and early 50s.
In a moment of irresistible if not injudicious public pride over all the damage he and his partners Black and Stone were doing to respectable politics, Nickpack's Chairman Dolan blurted this, in 1980, to the Post:
Groups like ours are potentially very dangerous to the political process. We could be a menace, yes. Ten independent expenditure groups, for example, could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics. We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn’t have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.
Which was, of course, precisely what the "group like" his was doing and which, along with right-wing others, turned the "potential" of "defeat[ing] the point of accountability in politics" into a grossly successful 30-year run.
And who was there all along, helping to plot the GOP's crooked course? Why, straight-talkin' John McCain's top adviser, Charlie Black.
Brace yourself.
Source URL: http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/articles/carpenter/049