A little legal update tonight that comes with pretty pictures, appropriate for Memorial Day weekend. Back in January, we discussed an incident that happened in New Hampshire ahead of the primary, involving a deep fake robocall of Joe Biden telling Democrats to stay home from the polls and “save” their vote for the general election.
Now, the political operative behind those calls, a Democrat named Steve Kramer, who was working for a short-lived challenger to Biden early in the primary season, has been indicted by the New Hampshire Attorney General, John Formella. Kramer is charged with 13 felony counts of voter suppression and 13 misdemeanor counts of impersonation of a candidate, related to 13 calls received by voters in various counties across the state. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined Kramer $6 million for "scam calls he set up to defraud voters" in violation of the federal Caller ID law. Here is the felony statute Kramer is charged with violating. A class B felony is punishable by up to seven years in prison.
Voter suppression, no matter who commits it, can’t be tolerated in a democracy. Four months from the crime to the indictment, with an impressive coordinated action between state prosecutors and federal regulators. It’s the kind of stuff that restores some of our confidence in government.
This is not just going to be one-and-done in New Hampshire, a point FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel made in connection with the announcement of the fine. We have lived through recent election cycles filled with foreign influence and disinformation spread on social media. Rosenworcel’s assessment of the New Hampshire calls was that they were “unnerving,” because “when a caller sounds like a politician you know, a celebrity you like, or a family member who is familiar, any one of us could be tricked into believing something that is not true with calls using AI technology." Add deep fake robocalls to the list of dirty tricks to be on the alert for as November gets closer.
New Hampshire’s fast action serves as a warning to other would-be deep fakers, but this obviously won’t be the last one. Voters in New Hampshire alerted law enforcement to the fake calls because, even though it sounded like President Biden and used some of his catchphrases, the message didn’t make sense. It’s a good reminder to apply common sense this election season, something all of us can do, whether it’s online or off. Be alert to and ready to report this sort of trickery. Now you’re up to speed on New Hampshire. Kramer will be arraigned in June, and the prosecution will proceed from there. I hope these lovely pictures of New Hampshire add a little beauty to your weekend.
Finally, a little reminder. A paid subscription to Civil Discourse gets you
Many of you, like me, will temper your picnics, barbecues, and other celebrations this weekend with remembrances of friends and family who served our country and whose memories define our relationships with and commitment to democracy. For me, it’s my Grandad, Ed Rodman, a first-generation American, who served in the Navy in WWII despite having three of his four older brothers already serving in the European theater. He had two small daughters at home. He loved his time in the Navy, but more importantly, he loved this country and made sure that his children and grandchildren did too. And I’m forever grateful. We’re in this together, Joyce |
Sunday, May 26, 2024
Update: Voter Suppression in New Hampshire
Sunday, May 14, 2023
The Long-Term Consequences of Republican Dirty Tricks
The Long-Term Consequences of Republican Dirty Tricks
You may remember the rising Democratic star of the post-Reagan era, Gary Hart, who was felled on his way to the presidency by a sex scandal.
Well it turns out that the whole thing was engineered by Republican dirty trickster Lee Atwater.
Atwater, on his deathbed, confessed the whole plot to an aide of Hart's back in 1990; now facing his own mortality, the aide has gone public with the story:
And in a private act of repentance that has remained private for nearly three decades, [Atwood] told Raymond Strother [Senator Gary Hart's media consultant] that he was sorry for how he had torpedoed Gary Hart’s chances of becoming president...
In early 1987, the Hart campaign had an air of likelihood if not inevitability that is difficult to imagine in retrospect. After Mondale’s landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1984, Hart had become the heir apparent and best hope to lead the party back to the White House....
Gary Hart had a nationwide organization and had made himself a recognized expert on military and defense policy....Early polls are notoriously unreliable, but after the 1986 midterms, and then–New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s announcement that he would not run, many national surveys showed Hart with a lead in the Democratic field and also over Bush....“Everyone agreed: it was Hart’s race to lose.”...
Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. “It wasn’t a ‘conversation,’ ” Strother said when I spoke with him recently. “There weren’t any pleasantries. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died.”
What he wanted to say, according to Strother, was that the episode that had triggered Hart’s withdrawal from the race, which became known as the Monkey Business affair, had been not bad luck but a trap. The sequence of events was confusing at the time and is widely misremembered now. But in brief:
In late March 1987, Hart spent a weekend on a Miami-based yacht called Monkey Business. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women took a picture of Hart sitting on the pier, with the other, Donna Rice, in his lap. A month after this trip, in early May, the man who had originally invited Hart onto the boat brought the same two women to Washington. The Miami Herald had received a tip about the upcoming visit and was staking out the front of Hart’s house....
“I thought there was something fishy about the whole thing from the very beginning,” Strother recalled. “Lee told me that he had set up the whole Monkey Business deal. ‘I did it!’ he told me. ‘I fixed Hart.’ After he called me that time, I thought, My God! It’s true!”
There was no affair between Gary Hart and Donna Rice; the appearance of it was carefully set up to destroy him as a political candidate.
"[The] plan would have involved: contriving an invitation from Broadhurst for Hart to come on a boat ride, when Hart intended to be working on a speech. Ensuring that young women would be invited aboard. Arranging for the Broadhurst boat Hart thought he would be boarding, with some unmemorable name, to be unavailable—so that the group would have to switch to another boat, Monkey Business. Persuading Broadhurst to “forget” to check in with customs clearance at Bimini before closing time, so that the boat “unexpectedly” had to stay overnight there. And, according to Hart, organizing an opportunistic photo-grab.
“There were a lot of people on the dock, people getting off their boats and wandering up and down on the wharf,” Hart told me. “While I was waiting for Broadhurst and whatever he was working out with the customs people, I sat on this little piling on the pier.” Hart said that Donna Rice’s friend and companion on the boat, Lynn Armandt, was standing a short distance away. “Miss Armandt made a gesture to Miss Rice, and she immediately came over and sat on my lap. Miss Armandt took the picture. The whole thing took less than five seconds, with lots of other people around. It was clearly staged, but it was used after the fact to prove that some intimacy existed.”
Of course there's no way to be certain that Hart would have won the nomination, or the election against George H. W. Bush. But if he had, there would have been no George W. Bush as president, no Cheney as vice president, no 9/11, no Iraq War, no War On Terror, no US sanctioned torture, no Guantanamo, perhaps no Great Recession...and surely no President Trump today.
On small things the great patterns and flows of history can sometimes turn, and even the perpetrators would be astounded at where they can lead.
Saturday, May 8, 2021
RSN: FOCUS: Jane Mayer | Lee Atwater's Secret Papers
07 May 21
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07 May 21
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FOCUS: Jane Mayer | Lee Atwater's Secret Papers
Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
Mayer writes: "An infamous Republican political operative's unpublished memoir shows how the Party came to embrace lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost."
t’s a Washington axiom that when a power player dies, their influence and secrets do as well. One night this spring, my phone chimed with a text message that showed otherwise. Sally Atwater, the widow of the legendary Republican political operative Lee Atwater, had died. She had been married to the bad boy of the G.O.P. during the Reagan and Bush years until his untimely death, thirty years ago. The Atwaters’ eldest daughter, Sara Lee, who lives in Brussels and is a Democrat, invited me over to her parents’ home to read through cartons of papers from her late father, whom I knew well when I covered the Reagan White House. They included seven chapters of Lee Atwater’s unpublished draft memoir, which had remained untouched since he succumbed to brain cancer, in 1991, at the age of forty, and at the height of his political career.
The house on a quiet street in Northwest Washington was the kind of tidy, brick place that bespeaks proper family life. The scene inside was something else. Its first-floor rooms were filled with a jumble of cardboard and plastic containers, overflowing with manila folders, crammed with everything from the former Republican Party chairman’s elementary-school papers to his dying thoughts, dictated to an assistant during his final days.
Some of the memorabilia was surprising. Despite Atwater’s well-deserved reputation for running racist campaigns, there were friendly private notes and photos of him with Al Sharpton and James Brown, whose onstage acrobatics Atwater was famous for trying to mimic in his own blues-guitar performances. There were also personal notes from underground-film stars of the John Waters era. According to his daughter, Atwater was a huge underground-film aficionado. While the Republican Party he chaired trumpeted family values and the Christian right, on the side he helped a friend open a video store in Virginia specializing in pornography, blaxploitation, and his own favorite genre, horror movies. Atwater experienced horror in his own life early. When he was five, his baby brother died of burns from an overturned vat of hot grease in the family’s kitchen. Atwater’s papers contained no mention of the tragedy, but he said that he heard the sounds of his brother’s screams every day of his life.
Atwater died before he could finish his memoir. What remains of it are hunks of yellowing typewritten pages, held together by rusting staples and paper clips. But the seven surviving chapters suggest that, far from dying along with him, the nihilism, cynicism, and scurrilous tactics that Atwater brought into national politics live on. In many ways, his memoir suggests that Atwater’s tactics were a bridge between the old Republican Party of the Nixon era, when dirty tricks were considered a scandal, and the new Republican Party of Donald Trump, in which lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost have become normalized. Chapter 5 of Atwater’s memoir in particular serves as a Trumpian precursor. In it, Atwater, who worked in the Office of Political Affairs in the Reagan White House, and managed George H. W. Bush’s 1988 Presidential campaign before becoming the Republican Party’s chairman at the age of thirty-seven, admits outright that he only cared about winning, not governing. “I’ve always thought running for office is a bunch of bullshit. Being in a office is even more bullshit. It really is bullshit,” he wrote. “I’m proud of the fact that I understand how much BS it is.”
In the nineteen-eighties, Atwater became infamous for his effective use of smears. Probably his best-known one was tying Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic Presidential opponent in 1988, to Willie Horton, a Black convict who went on a crime spree after getting paroled in the state. A menacing ad featuring Horton was a blatant attempt to stir fear among white voters that Dukakis would be soft on crime. At the very end of his life, Atwater publicly apologized to Dukakis for it. But Atwater’s draft memoir makes clear that he had already mastered the dark political arts as a teen-ager. In fact, it seems that practically everything Atwater learned about politics he learned in high school. It’s easy to see the future of the Republican Party in the anti-intellectual dirty tricks of his school days.
Born in Atlanta, Atwater grew up in a middle-class white family in South Carolina. His father worked in insurance, and his mother was a teacher. But from the start, Atwater was an ambitious and charismatic rebel, or, as he put it, a “hell-raiser.” While secretly gorging on history and literature—Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was one of his favorite books—he went out of his way to seem unstudious at school. He sneered at the top grade-getters and student-government leaders. His aim, he wrote, was to be seen as too smart and too cool to care. In high school, the only office he sought was to be voted the “wittiest.” To that end, he tried every day to do something funny. “If it wasn’t funny, it at least screwed somebody up. Every damn day, I’d screw people up. And that’s fun and funny. And I pulled a lot of shit.” Over time, he organized a group of about a hundred students to disrupt the school at his command. When speakers came to assembly, Atwater would signal his followers to rise in unison and turn their backs for a few seconds, or cross their legs in synchronized motions, or break out in wild applause. But Atwater was cunning. He writes that there was a “secret to screwing everything up” successfully. He always “understood the line” that he needed to stay within in order not to get caught. The No. 1 lesson was to be “so subtle that they can’t nab you for anything.”
Atwater could be amusing. As he rose in American politics, candidates and reporters alike were drawn to his subversive sense of humor, despite themselves. But throughout his life he displayed more than a tinge of amorality. In his memoir, Atwater describes, without remorse, falsely accusing another student of instigating a fight that he had started, and remaining silent after the student was paddled twenty-five times. “I didn’t tell the truth worth a shit,” he admits. He describes organizing six hundred and fifty students to spew spit wads at a female official who, he writes, hadn’t “been screwed in 20 years.” The best moment, in his view, was when a fellow-student threw a glass of ice at her, “and it really hurt her which was the funny part.”
The first presidential campaign that Atwater managed was a bid to get a friend of his elected as student-body president—against the friend’s wishes. He created a list of false accomplishments and devised a fake rating system that ranked his friend first. He plastered the school with posters declaring his friend’s platform of false promises of “Free Beer on Tap in the Cafeteria—Free Dates—Free Girls.” The campaign took a darker turn when Atwater’s sidekicks stomped on the bare feet of a hippie-like student until his feet bled profusely. Afterward, the group threatened to do the same to younger students unless they voted for Atwater’s candidate. Atwater recalls that he privately revelled in the tactics, and was proud that he could participate in “intimidating” his fellow-students. But publicly he feigned concern, or, as he writes, “I was acting like Eddie Haskell saying, ‘My gosh young people, you could be next.’ ” His candidate won an upset victory, but the school declared it void owing to a technicality. “I learned a lot,” he writes. “I learned how to organize . . . and I learned how to polarize.”
Although Atwater’s adult professional rise was meteoric, toward the end of his life his double game of paying homage to Black cultural leaders while milking racism for political gain caught up with him. His appointment to the board of trustees at Howard University, in Washington, shortly after Bush won the White House, provoked an uproar on campus. The student newspaper at the prestigious and historically Black university denounced him, and the students occupied an administration building in protest. In his papers, Atwater complains that Jesse Jackson duped him, writing, “If there’s anybody on the political scene who’s done me dirty, it’s Jesse Jackson.” Atwater writes that Jackson talked him into resigning from Howard’s board with a promise to lionize Atwater for doing so. Instead, the day after Atwater agreed to resign, Jackson went to Howard and “just kicked my guts out.” Sara Lee Atwater, who loved her father but not his politics, finds it somewhat fitting that as racial politics evolved, “The trickster got tricked.”
In the final months of his life, when it was clear that he wouldn’t recover, Atwater lamented the dirty, divisive campaigns he’d run, and apologized far and wide for them. His memoir calls on politicians to instead follow the Golden Rule. Roger Stone, who formed an early consulting and lobbying firm in the Washington area with Atwater, along with Paul Manafort and Charles Black, remains unconvinced about Atwater’s spiritual awakening. “Lee was a great storyteller,” Stone told me in a recent interview. “But, in the end, he was just grasping at straws. The Atwater family disagrees and has no doubt that he became a Christian. But at that point he was also Buddhist, Hindu, and everything else.”
Stone, of course, has had his own checkered track record in Republican politics, including a 2019 conviction for lying, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice, during the Mueller investigation—all of which Trump pardoned. In Stone’s view, however, Atwater was more of an opportunist. “We both knew he believed in nothing,” Stone told me. “Above all, he was incredibly competitive. But I had the feeling that he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil took it.”
Among the bits of memorabilia that Atwater kept was a rejection letter from the admissions office at the University of South Carolina. Having been contemptuous of grade-grubbing, his high-school transcript by his own admission was far from distinguished. But, a half century later, Atwater’s personal papers have had more luck. According to his daughter, the university has offered to find room for his memoir and other records in its archives. The Republican Party, however, doesn’t need to study Atwater’s lessons. It’s still using his playbook.
Friday, November 20, 2020
Karl Rove went down to Georgia, he was looking for a race to steal
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Tuesday, August 18, 2020
RSN: FOCUS: Robert Reich | Unlike Republicans, Democrats Can Govern. But Can They Fight?
18 August 20
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FOCUS: Robert Reich | Unlike Republicans, Democrats Can Govern. But Can They Fight?
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "It's important to understand the real difference between America's two political parties at this point in history."
s America heads into its quadrennial circus of nominating conventions (this year’s even more surreal because of the pandemic), it’s important to understand the real difference between America’s two political parties at this point in history.
Instead of “left” versus “right,” think of two different core competences.
The Democratic Party is basically a governing party, organized around developing and implementing public policies. The Republican Party has become an attack party, organized around developing and implementing political vitriol. Democrats legislate. Republicans fulminate.
In theory, politics requires both capacities – to govern, but also to fight to attain and retain power. The dysfunction today is that Republicans can’t govern and Democrats can’t fight.
Donald Trump is the culmination of a half century of GOP belligerence. Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricks” were followed by Republican operative Lee Atwater’s smear tactics, Newt Gingrich’s take-no-prisoners reign as House speaker, the “Swift-boating” of John Kerry, and the GOP’s increasingly blatant uses of racism and xenophobia to build an overwhelmingly white, rural base.
Atwater, trained in the southern swamp of the modern Republican Party, once noted: “Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, is a bad guy.” Over time, the GOP’s core competence came to be vilification.
The stars of today’s Republican Party, in addition to Trump, are all pugilists: Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio; Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Georgia’s Brian Kemp; Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson; and attack dogs like Rudolph Giuliani and Roger Stone.
But Republicans don’t have a clue how to govern. They’re hopeless at developing and implementing public policies or managing government. They can’t even agree on basics like how to respond to the pandemic or what to replace Obamacare with.
Meanwhile, the central competence of the Democratic Party is running government – designing policies and managing the system. Once in office, Democrats spend countless hours cobbling together legislative and regulatory initiatives. They overflow with economic and policy advisers, programs, plans, and goals.
But Democrats are lousy at bare knuckles political fighting. Their campaigns proffer policies but are often devoid of passion. (Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid was little more than a long list of detailed proposals.) Democrats seem stunned when their GOP opponents pillory them with lies, rage, and ad hominem attacks.
This has put Democrats at a competitive disadvantage. Political campaigns might once have been about party platforms, but today’s electorate is angrier and more cynical. Policy ideas rarely make headlines; conflict does. Social media favor explosive revelations, including bald lies. No one remembers Hillary Clinton’s policy ideas from 2016; they only remember Trump’s attacks on her emails.
As a result, the party that’s mainly good at attacking has been winning elections – and pushed into governing, which it’s bad at. In 2016, the GOP won the presidency, along with control over both chambers of Congress and most governorships. On the other hand, the party that’s mainly good a governing has been losing elections – pushed into the role of opposition and attack, which it’s bad at. (House speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, seems to have a natural gift for it.)
This dysfunction has become particularly obvious – and deadly – in the current national emergency. Trump and Senate Republicans have let the pandemic and economic downturn become catastrophes. They have no capacity to develop and implement strategies for dealing with them. Their knee-jerk response is to attack – China, Democrats, public health officials, protesters, “lazy” people who won’t work.
Democrats know what to do – House Democrats passed a comprehensive coronavirus bill in May, and several Democratic governors have been enormously effective – but they’ve lacked power to put a national strategy into effect.
All this may change in a few months when Americans have an opportunity to replace the party that’s bad at governing with the one that’s good at it. After all, Joe Biden has been at it for most of the past half century.
Trump and the GOP will pull out all the stops, of course. They’ve already started mindless, smarmy attacks.
The big question hovering over the election is whether Democrats can summon enough fight to win against the predictable barrage. Biden’s choice of running mate, Kamala Harris, bodes well in this regard. Quite apart from all her other attributes, she’s a fierce fighter.
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
FOCUS: As Roger Stone Awaits Sentencing Trump Hints at Pardon
 11 February 20
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11 February 20
Igor Derysh, Salon
Derysh writes: "President Donald Trump lashed out at federal prosecutors who recommended that his oldest political adviser, Roger Stone, serve up to nine years in prison after his conviction in former special counsel Bob Mueller's investigation."
“This is a horrible and very unfair situation,” Trump tweeted at 1 a.m. "Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!"
resident Donald Trump lashed out at federal prosecutors who recommended that his oldest political adviser, Roger Stone, serve up to nine years in prison after his conviction in former special counsel Bob Mueller's investigation.Top News | 'He’s Not Going to Run Unopposed': Sanders Rejects Schumer for Majority Leader
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