Obama Fights Back with new website: FightTheSmears.com
Last week the Obama campaign announced the opening of a new website: FightTheSmears.com.
The unfair and ridiculous attacks against Barack Obama are numerous and frequent. The new Obama website addresses some of the smears against Obama and directly and convincingly refutes them. FightTheSmears.com as a web-based rapid-response tactic is an interesting and significant development in the election campaign.
Political attacks come in all shapes and sizes. Of course, political smears are nothing new and I think go back to the first cave council elections in 56,742 B.C.
Often candidates directly attack their opponents in debates, official statements, and campaign commercials. This is a legitimate and above-board tactic because the candidate who is attacking must be accountable for the message. Sometimes the message is unfair, but at least it is out in the open for discussion, and the attacked candidate can choose how to respond directly to the attacker.
Barack Obama and John McCain have already engaged in some good clean “debate” on substantive issues. Both campaigns will do plenty of “spinning” to paint their opponent negatively and themselves positively. No doubt, some of their statements will be unfair and perhaps even blatantly false. But, I have some faith that both McCain and Obama want to run clean campaigns and will not tolerate smear tactics by their official surrogates.
A political smear is when people (often anonymous) create a lie about a candidate and aggressively spread the rumor. A smear campaign (focused in South Carolina) against John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries possibly impacted the contest enough to guarantee that George Bush would win the Republican nomination that year. That was an example of an effective “whisper” campaign because no one was accountable yet the disgraceful rumor spread widely.
Swift-Boating is a new verb:
During the 2004 presidential election campaign, a political group ironically named “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SWVT)” sponsored a $546,000 advertising campaign to air television commercials attacking Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.[ref] The ads focused on undermining the reputation of Senator Kerry’s military service as a highly decorated officer and veteran of the Vietnam War. Right-wing radio talks shows picked up on the SWVT message and repeatedly perpetuated this line of attack on Kerry. Many analysts believe that John Kerry and his campaign failed to recognize the seriousness of this smear. Kerry and his campaign were slow to respond and this may have cost Kerry the election.
527 Political Groups:
SWVT was one of many 527 political groups, as described by Wikipedia:
A 527 group is a type of American tax-exempt organization named after a section of the United States tax code, 26 U.S.C. § 527. A 527 group is created primarily to influence the nomination, election, appointment or defeat of candidates for public office. Although candidate committees and political action committees are also created under Section 527, the term is generally used to refer to political organizations that are not regulated by the Federal Election Commission or by a state elections commission, and are not subject to the same contribution limits as PACs.
527s are key in recent presidential elections. They legally can (and do) pour unlimited millions of dollars into attack ad campaigns while operating as officially separate from any candidate’s campaign. 527s fly beneath the radar of campaign finance reform. Expect to hear much more about 527s as we approach the general election.
One argument is that a campaign should not respond to smears because doing so simply helps advertise the falsehood. The Obama campaign decided that it is better to respond. Barack Obama has been and will be smeared. “Swift-boating” is the spreading of the lies, but a candidate is “swift boated” only if the smear works. FightTheSmears.com helps prevent Obama from being “swift boated”.
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Comment by chris
Posted on June 16, 2008 at 10:23 am
I have been checking out all the RNC smear sites. They are all over. I think Ive found another though it doesnt say it is with the RNC it matches their format. They attack Obama everyway you could imagine. If you want to check out the RNC latest attack machine I think its at www.TheObamaPlan.com
Comment by Grace
Posted on June 24, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Disgust - DO you know what form a face takes when it is in disgust. Just picture it - that’s how I feel about these two-sided smears. India and China are just licking their chops as we do our rendition of “a house divided cannot stand”. I’m an American but am almost on the other side - We have had so many chances to help clean up this global mess but are still at our own demented internal wars. Gas will never go lower than $4.00 a gallon. They want their piece of the pie and we blew it. There is something in my psyche that says …. yeah, American, you have the country and president you deserve.
Newsweek had an article recently entitled “The Great American Shopping Spree has come to a screeching halt” or some such verbiage….. Yeah, and about
time. I am about to go in to one of my monthly newsfasts. No news just the good Old U.S. doing a feeding frenzy on its own corpus. I don’t see any point in me listening to any of this crap - your site excluded. I’m back to my commercial-free CDs and my beloved books. Not a kindle - a real live book.
I’ve had it for the summer. Will tune in again in late September when this stuff “may” matter. Beyond hope is this country. They are all nuts and crooks and we all know it.