Dirty Tricks Within Parties

In class this past week, we learned about antipathy within parties and how it was prevalent during the 2000 presidential campaign. For the most part, when one thinks of antipathy between candidates, they assume the candidates are of opposite parties, rather than within the same party. In 2000, in South Carolina, the Bush campaign was supposedly behind a smear campaign against McCain. McCain was accused of fathering a black child, when in reality he and his wife adopted a Bengali baby from Mother Theresa, in hopes of the girl receiving the best medical attention here in the United States.

The allegations spread were absolutely untrue and damaged his campaign in South Carolina greatly. In an article about parenting, John McCain is interviewed as saying “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.”

In McCain's current campaign, his camp is quick to dispel any additional hurtful remarks or slander. Recently, in South Carolina, a flyer is circulating newspapers with a disgraceful cartoon, shown below, that "accuses McCain of collaborating with his captors and betraying other POWs" (TPM Election Central). This is most likely not the result of another GOP candidate's campaign, but that of Vietnam veterans against McCain. The article states "the fact that the McCain camp has moved so aggressively to publicize and push back against the flyer suggests that the McCain campaign is taking a new approach in a state where such dirty tricks stopped his campaign in 2000". Dirty tricks, by any organization, in this campaign are not hindering his status as front runner, these new approaches must be working well.

Sources Used:

Sargent, Greg. Election Central, Talking Points Memo. "Vicious South Carolina Flyer attacks McCain's Vietnam Service Jan 18 2008.

Interview with John McCain through DadMag.com "http://www.dadmag.com/archive/060400jmccain.php"