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When Sarah Palin accepted the Republican nomination for vice president, one of her first actions was enticing a crowd of hyper-partisan conservatives to give a rousing cheer for ... Hillary Clinton.
On the face of it, this seems absurd. After all, the Right has spent the past two decades accusing Clinton of everything from lesbianism to murder -- why ever would they applaud someone whom they deeply loathe? Had they suddenly become awash with affection for the woman they once dubbed "Hitlery?" Seasoned political observers, however, understood exactly what was going on, as Palin's shameless Clinton fluffing was perhaps the grandest ratfuck campaign yet attempted on a national stage.
For the uninitiated, "ratfucks" are dirty tricks that are not only designed to humiliate and embarrass your opponents, but to create mistrust and turn them against each other. As Rick Perlstein documents in his grand tome Nixonland, right-wing operatives Donald Segretti and Jeb Stuart Magruder used a wide assortment of pranks to sabotage the 1972 Democratic primaries. Notorious examples included slipping bogus flight schedules to Democratic front-runner Ed Muskie's pilot to make him land in the wrong city; letters written to Democrats under a "Citizens for Muskie" letterhead that accused rival candidates of homosexuality and drunken driving; and circulating false stories about Muskie ridiculing Canadians to a right-wing newspaper in New Hampshire.
During this year's Democratic primary, Rush Limbaugh carried on this fine tradition by urging his supporters to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary Clinton to increase the probability that she and rival Barack Obama would engage in destructive inter-party feuds. With Palin's nomination and subsequent praise of Hillary Clinton, the ratfuck achieved national prominence for the first time: The McCain campaign seems to really think that it can pick off former Clinton supporters by appealing to whatever lingering spite they harbor from the primary campaign.
But while conservatives have been the most enthusiastic advocates of ratfuck campaigns over the last 30 years, Democrats should not overlook their potential to help defeat John McCain in November. Lest we forget, many of McCain's supporters ardently hate his guts and are only voting for him out of spite for Barack Obama and his fancy-pants love of vegetables and exercise. And while many conservatives have made pleasing noises about McCain's choice of Palin for vice president, it might only take a few strategically placed references to comprehensive immigration reform to get some of them to stay home on Election Day.
Here, then, is my plan for ratfucking the McCain campaign.
Step 1: Figure out which rats are the cheapest dates.
When you begin your ratfucking operation, you want to start from the path of least resistance. Therefore, it's important to discern which McCain supporters are hard-core devotees and which ones are only voting for him to get Palin as their vice president. George W. Bush was notoriously difficult to ratfuck because all three major factions of the Republican base -- the social conservatives, the neoconservatives and the supply-side conservatives -- backed him to the hilt. In McCain's case, fortunately, the only true hard-core devotees in the conservative movement appear to be the neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard. The reason? Well, McCain seems to like the idea of starting more wars and indefinitely occupying other countries. This is the type of thing that gives neoconservatives thrills up their legs. Indeed, one gets the sense that the neocons wouldn't give a rat's ass if McCain raised the income tax rate to 1 million percent as long as he put all the money into invading more nations. So the neocons are out: No amount of sly seduction or flattery will get you into the sack with them. Luckily, there is much more fertile ground to be harvested with evangelicals and anti-illegal immigration activists.
To state the obvious: Social conservatives and anti-immigration conservatives do not like McCain. They really, really, really, really do not like McCain. Michelle Malkin, for one, thinks that McCain's efforts on comprehensive immigration reform make him a "Hispanderer" whose "heart is with La Raza, the militantly ethnocentric, anti-immigration enforcement Hispanic lobbying group that honored him in 1999 and whose annual conference he keynoted in 2004." Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, meanwhile, has accused McCain of going "out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes" of social conservatives and has said that he wouldn't vote in the 2008 election if McCain were on the ticket. (After McCain tapped Palin for his running mate, of course, Dobson dutifully came back to the fold. Even so, the resentments still likely linger.)
See more stories tagged with: mccain
Brad Reed is a writer living in Boston. His work has previously appeared in the American Prospect Online, and he blogs frequently at Sadly, No!.
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