In the mideighties, the state of Mississippi, which later served as our proving ground as opposition researchers, was in the throes of a particularly brutal, and surreal, gubernatorial election. At the center stood a trio of transvestite prostitutes who claimed they’d had sex, on numerous occasions, with the leading candidate, a Democrat who was then the state attorney general. Notably, considering where we were, the prostitutes were black and the AG was white.
I was a reporter in Jackson at the time, and the newspaper’s statewide editor, a fiery former marine and Vietnam War veteran, supervised the coverage of the story, which attracted a national media circus that included Geraldo Rivera, the controversial correspondent for the ABC News show 20/20. During a particularly aggressive interview, Rivera, a proud pioneer of trash TV, drove one of the transvestites to tears by angrily demanding to know how it felt to have “ruined a man’s life.” It was, in a way, a legitimate question, particularly considering the transvestites’ penchant for changing their stories, but his delivery was unnecessarily rough. On-camera, the transvestites came across as physically striking, yet they were shy, and clearly unprepared for what they were getting into when they agreed to vogue with the Republican businessmen who hired them to go public with their stories.
The viciousness of Rivera’s attack and the prostitute’s resulting distress prompted my editor, who was present for the interview, to intercede. He and Rivera exchanged a few heated words and the argument devolved into a shoving match—a precursor to Rivera’s brawl a few years later with skinheads, that famously earned him a broken nose. So it was that a freelance opposition research campaign undertaken by a group of conservative businessmen resulted in a Vietnam War vet fighting with Geraldo Rivera in defense of a sobbing transvestite. And that was just the offstage action.
The newspaper’s executive editor had initially balked at reporting the results of the businessmen’s inflammatory research, which they had privately presented to him. The group was comprised of longtime Republicans in what was then a staunchly Democratic state, and they clearly had a political vendetta against the AG. More importantly, there were significant questions about the veracity of their claims. Rather than accept the businessmen’s word for it, the newspaper’s editors assigned two reporters to investigate the matter independently.
The reporters discovered that the businessmen had hired a private detective agency to interview the prostitutes along with policemen who claimed to have seen the AG speaking with trolling prostitutes as they made their rounds. The businessmen then paid the transvestites to go public, and afterward sequestered them in various hotels across the Louisiana line, presumably to control access and to ensure they could find them when they needed them.
At the beginning, the Republican gubernatorial candidate steered clear of endorsing the businessmen’s claims, though they were designed to get him elected. That would soon change. As the scandal reached a fever pitch, even his wife got in on it, smugly proclaiming during one speaking engagement, in reference to the fact that the attorney general was, you know, divorced, “I’m running for first lady, and I’m unopposed.”
Ultimately, the lurid details, the shockingly personal nature of the attack, questions about the businessmen’s payments to the prostitutes and attempts to convince the attorney general’s financial donors to abandon him, together with the lack of clearly documented evidence, did not sit well with either the public or the media.
A reporter asked one of the businessmen during a news conference, “Are you attempting to ruin the man? Are you trying to defeat him? Are you trying to get him to withdraw? What are you doing?” Eventually, television and radio stations refused to sell the group airtime for their campaign ads, enabling the beleaguered attorney general to control the dialogue about the scandal. The result was that the Republican candidate’s campaign was eclipsed by a bizarre sideshow staged by his own supporters.
Those of us in the newsroom found the scandal both riveting and sublimely wrong. I wasn’t one of the reporters assigned to investigate it, but everyone in the newsroom was consumed by what was going down. For Michael and me, looking back as researchers, the obvious question is whether we would undertake such research for a campaign today. Our conclusion is that we would, initially, if only because it concerned a high law enforcement official allegedly breaking the law. But would we spy on the attorney general with night vision goggles or pay the transvestites for their story? No way. We’re not private eyes. We’d interview the transvestites in hopes of documenting the allegations, but to purchase their stories would undermine the credibility of our findings, assuming there were any. Paying someone to create what appeared to be documentation is altogether different from documenting facts. If the allegations were impossible to prove, we’d advise the campaign to leave it alone. It would be up to them to decide what to do after that. We’d be on our way to the next race.
The most effective opposition research isn’t necessarily the most shocking, particularly since few of us are truly shocked by much anymore. What work best are activities that stand in stark contrast to a candidate’s public actions or stated positions on the issues. When a congressman gets caught sleeping with a female staffer, it’s a bit worse if he’s been touting abstinence education. If he’s popular and handles the controversy well, the candidate may yet survive the onslaught, but no one likes a hypocrite. Regardless of their political persuasions, people like consistency, and inconsistency can be documented.
In today’s world, where everything, it seems, is being documented, evidence of the disparities between a candidate’s words and deeds is easier to come by. Almost everyone’s phone has a camera and voice recorder. Video surveillance cameras track our daily routines. Sometimes we even reveal ourselves. It’s not uncommon for mothers to post photos of their kids on Facebook, along with their names and the times they pick them up at school, for all the pedophiles of the world to see. The concept of privacy has been turned upside down. If you’re a public figure, good luck sliding in and out of the shadows unnoticed for long.
It’s not as if people are more prone to committing indiscretions today, sexual or otherwise, or to do so while holding press conferences about the importance of family values, whatever those are. It’s just easier to document their behavior, and to frame it within the context of their perceived ability to lead. For our purposes, facts provide the foundation. But a candidate’s missteps not only must be proved, they must also be significant to the broader issue of a candidate’s fitness to serve. The danger, of course, is that in an age of rampant documentation, the documents can themselves be abused. Paragraphs or snippets of video can be taken out of context or even doctored to create a false set of “facts” that may then be embraced, unquestioningly, by the media and the general public. In such an environment, it’s almost as if the “reader comments” on news sites and blogs are being authored by the same two angry people, one a conservative, one not, neither of whom is anyone you’d want to get stuck talking with at a party. Aside from not knowing the difference between “your” and “you’re,” they have one trait in common: their disregard for actual documented facts.
This combination of partisan fervor and disregard for facts helps explain how you end up with CNN, once a straight-up news organization, legitimizing a Tea Partier’s claim that he’d unearthed “evidence” linking a newly crowned pageant winner whose greatest affront was to be Muslim with a reputed terrorist by the same last name, under the headline: MISS USA: MUSLIM TRAILBLAZER OR HEZBOLLAH SPY? Or how Fox News could run a video of the president saying taxes were going to go up substantially, after editing the snippet out of context to make it sound as if he were acknowledging the ramifications of his own policies rather than attributing the tax increase to his predecessor’s, as he actually did. Politicians also respond in kind. The Obama administration, after all, forced USDA official Shirley Sherrod out of her job after a conservative web predator cynically edited a video of a speech she’d given about the importance of racial understanding. By making it seem that she’d said the opposite of what she had actually said, she came off sounding like a racist. Only later did the administration recognize that it had acted on a falsehood, and by then it was too late. If you need further evidence, in September 2009 an estimated 60,000 to 75,000 people showed up on the Mall in the nation’s capital to protest Obama’s political agenda. Conservative blogs ran photos purportedly taken at the event that showed a crowd of two million—photos that were, in fact, taken at a different, much larger march. Whether conservatives are more adept than liberals at such manipulations of reality is open for debate, but the point is that technology makes fabrication easy. It’s more crucial than ever to verify the underlying source of the purported facts.
A police detective who gets caught tampering with factual evidence will likely get his case thrown out of court, but in the realm of politics, that same practice may be rewarded. Consider the following tidbit from Yahoo! News concerning Obama’s decision to cancel a trip to the Sikh Golden Temple in India, ostensibly because he (or his advisers) was concerned about the possibility that photo ops of him wearing a weird, un-Christian head covering at a foreign, un-Christian religious site would go viral. Perhaps the potential for outrage, which the article sought to exploit, had precedent in the revulsion many Americans feel about one of their leaders curtsying before the Queen, but the Golden Temple is threatening only if you are wholly unfamiliar with Sikh culture.
Yahoo! began the Obama Sikh-hat story in a fairly straightforward manner, noting that in “any other political climate” the president’s visit would be noncontroversial. Soon, however, the article put aside this sensibility, saying that his decision not to go “reportedly” had nothing to do with the Sikh faith, but that the determining factor, “apparently,” was the dread of White House advisers that photos would spread virally. The article then cited precedents for such worries, including “fringe political theories” calling the president’s U.S. citizenship into dispute, which “have stubborn staying power in the age of Internet conspiracy-mongering.” A photo of the president in “foreign religious ceremonial gear” would provide “catnip” to such theories.
The basic question was how the president of the United States could possibly be required to wear a special hat, especially considering that ill-advised Americans often mistake Sikhs for Muslims. The president’s decision, therefore, could be seen as an affront to Sikhs, not to mention Muslims, not to mention ill-advised Americans of other faiths, or of no faith at all. At this point Yahoo! provided a helpful link to a “related” story: MICHELLE OBAMA CRITICIZED FOR SUMMER VACATION.
The article went on to say, “It’s unclear, at any rate, whether this sort of last-minute impression management can make much of a difference in a status quo that already has 1 in 5 Americans believing that the president is secretly a Muslim.” Yahoo! then offered links to various other presumably related stories, including COULD 2012 DOOMSDAY PREDICTION BE WILDLY INACCURATE? and 10 FAILED DOOMSDAY PREDICTIONS and EARTH IN THE BALANCE: 7 CRUCIAL TIPPING POINTS and TOP 10 WAYS TO DESTROY EARTH, the latter of which linked to a story that indicated the Obama Sikh-hat thread was fraying: TOP 10 USELESS LIMBS (AND OTHER VESTIGIAL ORGANS). Not surprisingly, TOP 10 USELESS LIMBS linked to nothing; it was the logical, final destination of a journey that began with a discussion about President Obama potentially wearing an unfamiliar hat.
A subsequent Yahoo! News article predicted massive outrage over Obama’s decision to visit a mosque in Indonesia, though his two presidential predecessors had made similar visits to Islamic holy sites while in office.
Given all of that, it’s easy to understand the Obama administration’s trepidation about the Sikh hat, assuming the administration did, in fact, cancel the trip for that reason. This is a new era of political news, in which a story can be fabricated out of whole Sikh-inspired cloth and become a legitimate part of the debate.
As Michael Hirschorn observed in The Atlantic, a few weeks before the 2010 midterm congressional elections, “When you enter the realm of politics and ideology, the distinction between opinion and fact starts to cloud, and the stakes become dauntingly high; there is no system of communal ‘we’ to rely on to hash out issues of the truth.” The result, Hirschorn concluded, is that “the dislodging of fact from the pedestal it had safely occupied for centuries makes the recent disturbances in politics and the media feel like symptoms of a larger epistemological, even civilizational, rot. The next presidential election will, no doubt, be something to watch.”
The truth is that were it not necessary to rely on incontrovertible, documented facts, opposition research would be—well, it would actually be a lot easier. We could simply report that a certain candidate had roomed in a fraternity house with someone who was later convicted of date rape or who had a close friend who was in the mob or whatever, and go from there. We could take the purchased narratives of disingenuous prostitutes as gospel. But because Michael and I are, at heart, journalists—agnostic in our assessments even as we’re aligned with a political party—nothing matters to us that cannot be substantiated beyond a shadow of a doubt.
While we objectively investigate and report on the subjects of our research, what separates us from full-time journalists is that we never directly publish our political work (though I do publish freelance newspaper and magazine articles on other topics). As a result we have limited control over how it’s eventually presented to you, if it’s presented at all, much less how you will choose to receive it. Whether what truly matters will matter at election time is never clear until the end. Campaigns sometimes make bad decisions. Untruths go viral. Other issues come to the fore. Large numbers of gullible, ill-informed people flock to the polls. There are no guarantees. We’ve seen baseless attacks succeed, and we’ve found truly disturbing information that our campaigns chose not to use, which as a result never saw the light of day, ultimately to the public’s disservice.
One of the most disturbing research reports we’ve done involved a candidate for mayor. We discovered evidence—an obscure newspaper interview, which saw no local coverage—concerning allegations that the candidate had molested two young gangsta wannabes whom he had taken into his home, ostensibly to help them. The boys had subsequently filed complaints with the local police department, the records of which had since disappeared, after which both young men were murdered. The cases never came to trial. We had no way of knowing if the candidate did anything wrong, but there was that one documented interview in which he acknowledged that he may have touched the boys inappropriately, and there was the issue of those police files that had mysteriously disappeared.
Our candidate chose not to use the information because it was so distasteful and squalid, and the opponent, the alleged molester, won. Over the course of his term, he took more errant boys into his home. He was eventually indicted on federal charges stemming from an incident in which he was riding around, allegedly drunk, in a police department RV, and along the way had, with a group of thuggish guys, taken sledgehammers to an occupied house, claiming it was a drug den, though he had no legal justification. By the time the mayor came up for reelection, he was done and the city government was in shambles. He ended up losing the election, was hospitalized with suspected heart problems on election night and died two days later. The story of the alleged molestations never came out. The voters never knew.
Even if a campaign uses our findings, and uses them judiciously, every community has its own threshold of tolerance for various affronts, and those thresholds are subject to change. Before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatened to destroy the local way of life, a region such as southern Louisiana, which is dominated by the petroleum extraction and fishing industries, might not have cared that an incumbent voted for appropriations benefitting an oil company from which he’d received large campaign donations. But now? That dynamic has changed.
Because the public tends to take a dim view of gratuitous attack campaigns, such information is often leaked to reporters who act as codependents and enablers—a relationship that sometimes leaves Michael and me, as erstwhile journalists, ambivalent. We’ve had a few awkward encounters with reporter friends while poking around in newspaper libraries, and the symbiosis can be tricky because reporters, if nothing else, like to think they discover the news. One of the mistakes the Mississippi businessmen made when they trotted out their prostitutes was not feeding their information to the media in a way that allowed the reporters to assume ownership, rather than to react with skepticism, which is every journalist’s default setting. As a result, the media assumed ownership of a story about the political attack rather than the potentially damaging information on which it was based. Political campaigns have to consider the entire spectrum that oppo research will pass through, from the clerk at the counter to the campaign to the media and finally to the voters themselves. Self-centeredness, to the point that they deem something important simply because it seems important to them, or unimportant precisely because they don’t care, will get them in trouble sooner or later.
In our experience, both inexperienced, unwary candidates and seasoned elected officials sometimes fall for the lure of questionable opportunities, for different reasons—one, because they’re politically naïve, and the other, because they’ve grown complacent or arrogant. Learning about local communities helps us understand how a deed that would go unnoticed in one place will play big in another. In the Deep South, where manners are part of the local currency, being impolite may be more damaging than whatever rude detail you have to relate. A lot hinges on how the campaign delivers the news, if the campaign chooses to do so at all.
What’s different about legitimate opposition research, as opposed to unfounded attack campaigns, is its factual basis and how the results come into play. Some campaigns may simply assign an intern or a volunteer to do perfunctory document reviews, then put the information out there for public consumption, but in the best cases the results of more exhaustive research are used to craft a cohesive, factual, negative storyline about the opposing candidate, and meanwhile to prepare for whatever negative storyline the opponent may craft about you. Everything, including the opponent’s and your defense, is framed within that context. It’s not so different from watching the video of your adversary in a boxing match, or a football game, to identify his strengths and weaknesses. Portray your political opponent as a liar, based on one documented event, and it’s possible to throw everything into doubt.
Michael and I cling to the belief that if the truth is revealed it will prevail, but it doesn’t always work that way. An elected official can repeatedly claim that he fought in Vietnam, when he didn’t, and be reelected. Opposition research, even when it succeeds, sometimes fails. The fruit goes bad after it’s picked or for whatever other reason just doesn’t sell. One need look no further than Mississippi in 1983. As remarkable as the events of the state’s gubernatorial election that year were, the outcome was even more stunning. Due to public revulsion over the conservative businessmen’s attacks, the candidate—a white attorney general who’d been accused of having sex with black transvestites in a Bible Belt state with a notoriously conflicted racial history—won. Here was a cautionary tale about how wrong opposition research can go—how badly the practice can be abused and how utterly it can backfire.
Admittedly, some things were different then. The idea of attacking a candidate’s personal life went against the tenor of the times, and the public’s distaste over this violation of decorum seems dated today. People were also more easily shocked then than they are now, which is why the prurient nature of the attack made them feel as if their own privacy had been invaded. Yet the businessmen’s attack campaign, and their candidate’s inevitable embrace of it, broke a host of rules that still apply. One is that despite the bewildering success of sensationally false allegations in the blogosphere and on cable news today, it’s still a good rule of thumb to avoid using hookers as your star witnesses—particularly if you also paid for their services, for whatever it was you were into (in this case you just wanted them to talk, which had no doubt been the case before). Second, it’s always a good idea to make sure you can satisfy media scrutiny and that you have the immediate support of your own candidate. You want to control the story from the outset. There can be no questions about anyone’s commitment to it. It’s crucial to ensure that you, not the subject of the attack, will be the recipient of public sympathy. There are many routes to accomplish this, all of which involve knowing—for real—that the damnable thing you’re about to say about someone is true, that it matters and that it can be proved.
If the voters decide to elect the guy anyway, you have no choice but to move on. That’s democracy.