It’s getting increasingly hard for an independent voter sick of politicians who tear tear down their opponents and claw their way up to the top to find a candidate who’ll just make the case why THEY deserve to be President.
Here’s the latest episode that should be condemned and repudiated by the candidate who is benefiting from what appears to be one of the most insidious forms of political manipulation and attack — the push poll:
Bernie Campbell, a 26-year-old public school teacher in Laconia, N.H., was eating dinner at home Friday night with his wife, a graduate student at Dartmouth, when he got a phone call.
“Would you like to participate in a 60-second poll on the New Hampshire primary?” the automated voice asked.
I got one like this during Election 2004 that turned into a push poll. It began exactly the same way (when I found out what it was, I hung up and MADE SURE I didn’t vote for that person):
Campbell, a West Lebanon, N.H., co-chair for the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., figured what the heck, it was just 60 seconds.
After he told the automated caller that he intended to vote in the Jan. 8, 2008, New Hampshire GOP primary, that he considers himself pro-life, and that he intends to vote for McCain, the poll took on a decidedly negative tone, Campbell told ABC News.
“It was a series of questions that you would associate with a push poll,” Campbell said, referring to the negative campaigning technique of pretending to be a pollster gathering information from voters when really the intention is to spread negative information about a rival.
And, (not) coincidentally, Governor Huckabee is now reportedly soaring higher than an arrested rock star in the polls in Iowa — but he continues to lag badly in New Hampshire, where his dead-serious task is to show that he’s more than a one shot-wonder so he can get Big Mo and Big (Campaign) Bux. His problem: others are way ahead of him and some think McCain could even pull a comeback in the state.
So what are backers of a candidate that’s behind TO DO?
Plant negative info (which may not be accurate upon complete examination) with voters while pretending to take a poll, of course:
The automated machine, which identified itself as being with Common Sense Issues, threw Campbell questions about whether he’d be less likely to support McCain if he knew the Arizona senator opposed a federal amendment to ban same sex marriage, or that he’d hurt the anti-abortion-rights cause by leading the charge for campaign finance reform.
Campbell said the call ended before he could even find a pen to start taking notes on what was being said, once he realized he was in the midst of some shady campaign tactics.Earlier this month Common Sense Issues — which is affiliated with supporters of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — set up an organization called Trust Huckabee, which began making calls in Iowa praising Huckabee and disparaging Huckabee’s opponents.
And indeed, if this is what is going on ,then voters who aren’t affiliated with Huckabee can “trust Huckabee” (or the people actively supporting him) to start trying to pull ahead by doing a politics-as-usual campaign seeking to politically disembowel his opponents and drive up their negatives. But this is the way politics works — and the trending in recent elections is to harder hardball, not softer softball.
But there could be a peril here for Huckabee.
Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign has seemingly hit the skids after her camp went negative. Whether it’s due to that or not, her camp’s attacks on Senator Barack Obama have seemingly backfired.
Huckabee’s camp could face the same thing if this poll foreshadows what is to come — particularly now that Huckabee has political pro Ed Rollins on his side.
Hillary Clinton has countered some of the recent bad p.r. and poll nosedives by having her husband former President Bill Clinton go to her defense on the stump and on TV. But that is proving a double-edged sword and most likely will be pointed to as a reason for Ms. Clinton’s slump, if she fails to get the nomination: she did better when she was totally at the forefront and Bill Clinton was (relatively) quiet in the background. Increasingly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign seems to be giving out a message about What Bill Thinks.
The question is: what does Huckabee think about push-polling on his behalf? And what does McCain think — after his bitter experience at the hands of George Bush and Karl Rove in South Carolina in 2000?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.