November 7, 2006
Murray Chotiner and Karl Rove Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 PM EST Apologies for having assumed that most readers were familiar with the events that transpired in South Carolina during the 2000 presidential primary cycle. Since Mr. Gordon seems completely unaware of the back story, I’ll provide it for him, nice and slow. It is true that one cannot directly tie George W. Bush’s campaign to the push-polls that suggested inaccurately (and irrelevantly) that John McCain fathered a child with a black woman. That’s the marvelous thing about push-polls: It’s maddeningly difficult to trace them. By the same token, Richard Nixon’s 1950 Senate campaign did not directly fund the phone-bank calls that informed thousands of California voters that Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, his Democratic challenger, was married to a Jew—a damaging bit of information in 1950. But few historians doubt that the tactic was masterminded by Nixon’s political dirty tricks man, Murray Chotiner. With a wink and nod from Chotiner, the rabid anti-Semitic demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith enlisted his Christian Nationalist Crusade to disseminate the same information. Despite pleas from moderates that he distance himself from Smith, Nixon took weeks before he openly renounced anti-Semitism. (As transcripts of his Oval Office tapes later proved, the renunciation was disingenuous.) What’s widely known about the 2000 South Carolina primary is that independent groups like the National Right to Life Committee, the National Rifle Association, and Americans for Tax Reform financed a vicious mail and television campaign against John McCain, and that the themes of these mail and TV buys often overlapped with other push-polls and whisper campaigns that were unleashed against the Arizona senator. These groups did not, of course, openly accuse McCain of fathering a child with a black woman, though an influential professor at Bob Jones University—an evangelical college with strong ties to Ralph Reed, who was then a strategist for the Bush campaign—did. The general thematic overlap between third-party ads supporting Bush and the subterranean whisper campaign against McCain strongly suggests collusion. Furthermore, as The Atlantic Monthly disclosed in a lengthy article on Bush’s latter-day Murray Chotiner, Karl Rove has been using such tactics since his days running state judicial races in Texas. On balance, the evidence strongly suggests that the push polls originated with the Bush campaign.
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