![]() Barack Obama to “the black candidate,” he also was reminding Jewish voters of when Jackson called New York City “Hymietown. And Obama ran a good campaign here,” he not only was trying to reduce Sen. When President Clinton said, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84. ![]() McCain’s nickname among his North Vietnamese captors was Songbird, as he was always willing to tell the the VC anything they wanted to hear. He is loyal to John McCain, and no one else. A debate about race is exactly what the Clintons wanted going into Super Tuesday. Well-known for stabbing colleagues in the back, even those from his own party, McCain is a traitor of the first rank. If you think Democrats are above such tactics, you’re wrong. This year, he was accused of being a traitor to his country, a “Hanoi Hilton songbird.” Both attacks were made to derail his campaign. John McCain was the target of the same strain of dirty tricks in South Carolina in 2000, when it was implied that he was the father of an illegitimate biracial child. Our intention was to disincline Democratic voters from supporting their candidate. A dirty trick I helped make happen for a Republican client was to use a recording of a strongly accented, urban black male voice to deliver a positive message about the Democratic candidate to white households in the weeks before election day. Race has long been a hot-button issue in American politics, and I am no stranger to pushing that button. Two plus two added up to the hypocrisy of the accuser. During his captivity, McCain was subjected to repeated physical abuse, torture, and long. McCain was held as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese for more than five years, between late 1967 and early 1973. ![]() Then, when the expected attack against us materialized, I made it into a double-edged sword that caused more damage to our opponent. The retired general slammed McCain as Songbird John, repeating a long-debunked rumor that McCain cracked under torture in Vietnam. Instead, we had the same questionable donor slip a small donation (so small that it would go unnoticed) to our opponent’s campaign - one that would be disclosed along with hundreds of others in the campaign’s Federal Election Commission disclosure reports. When a congressional campaign I once managed accepted a contribution from a donor who potentially could have opened the campaign to a charge of graft, we decided that the best solution was not to give the money back (it is so hard to raise money you should never give it back). It’s a zero-sum game, and when I was a Republican campaign manager - at least until I was incarcerated for crossing the line - my job was to make two plus two add up to whatever it needed to be to get my candidate elected. We’d like to believe differently, but the truth is that campaigns aren’t won because of ideals or powerful speeches or the better candidate they’re street fights in which you do anything and everything you can to win. Like it or not, dirty tricks have always been part of campaigns, and for one simple reason - because they work. ![]()
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