November 6, 2006
Campaign Tricks II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:40 PM EST Just a couple of comments on the post by Joshua Zeitz regarding campaign dirty tricks. About the scandal involving Grover Cleveland and the illegitimate child (“Ma! Ma! where’s my pa?/ Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!”), I’m not sure why he puts “illegitimate child” in quotes. There was no question the boy was both real and illegitimate, the question was whether or not Cleveland was the father. Cleveland admitted that it was possible but doubted that he was in fact. Several other men, apparently, might also have been, including his close friend and law partner Oscar Folsom, who, unlike Cleveland, was married. (The mother had chosen to name the child Oscar Folsom Cleveland.) Folsom was killed the next year in a traffic accident, and many think that Cleveland accepted responsibility for the child in order to protect the widow from scandal and pain. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Such was the case in the 2000 South Carolina primary, when someone paid for a push poll that asked Republican voters, ‘Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?’ Conveniently, George W. Bush’s campaign left no fingerprints on the poll.” Excuse me? Is Mr. Zeitz accusing the Bush campaign of paying for this poll? If so, why use the term “someone”? If not, what is that word “conveniently” doing in the last sentence? It implicitly assumes guilt in the same sentence in which he states there is no evidence of that guilt. Mr. Zeitz’s examples of recent dirty tricks are, ummm, conveniently one-sided. Indeed, they are Republican dirty tricks each and every one. I have no doubt whatever that the Republicans are quite as capable of dirty tricks and quite as guilty of putting them into effect as the Democrats. But the reverse of that last sentence is equally true. We are all miserable sinners, especially when it comes to politics. So, in the interests of being fair and balanced, to coin a phrase, here are a few Democratic dirty tricks. In Milwaukee on November 2, 2004, vehicles rented by the Republicans to carry voters to the polls had their tires slashed, impeding the party’s get-out-the-vote effort. Found guilty of the crime and sentenced to jail were four men, one the son of a Democratic congresswoman, another the son of the former Democratic acting mayor of Milwaukee. Just last week a federal grand jury in Missouri handed up four indictments against workers for ACORN for voter fraud. The federal district attorney’s office in Kansas City said after the indictments that this was part of national investigation that is still very much ongoing. ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is a liberal group funded by the AFL-CIO that has conducted voter registration drives in many states and been found guilty of numerous false registrations. In 2004 one ACORN worker in Ohio was found to have been given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations of dead people, underage people, and people named Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy. ACORN makes it a regular practice to register people over long periods of time but to submit those registrations only at the very last minute before a filing deadline for voter registrations. If anyone can give me a reason for that other than trying to overwhelm the system and get phony registrations through, I’d appreciate hearing about it. Tighter voter registration and voting procedures are consistently popular with the general population and with all subsets of the population, regardless of race, location, and income. And yet the left has opposed each and every attempt to reform the system to prevent voter fraud. The left is against both voter fraud and any attempt whatever to prevent voter fraud. That can’t be because they feel they can win honest elections.
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