McCain Insider Admits to Writing Fraudulent Letters to the Editor

Posted by Kathy G, The G-Spot at 10:48 AM on September 24, 2008.

Salon has got itself a scoop: they've published an insider's account of how she wrote fraudulent letters to the editor on behalf of the McCain campaign. Working out of the campaign's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, the author, Margriet Oostveen, produced pro-McCain letters that would then be signed by supporters in battleground states and placed in local papers.

The ghostwriters were openly encouraged to blatantly lie. Oostveen quotes McCain staffer Phil Tuchman exhorting the volunteers: "You can be whoever you want to be. You can be a beggar or a millionaire. A mom or a husband. Whatever. You decide!" Oostveen describes how she wrote her first letter, a shamelessly treacly concoction in which she falsely claimed to be the mother of a soldier stationed in Iraq. The letter got a big thumbs-up from the McCain people, with staffer Tuchman raving, "It appeals to the hearts of people. Can you write more letters?"

Sleazy as the fake letter ploy may be, there's nothing new about it. On the contrary, it's an ancient standby from the standard Republican playbook. As Rick Perlstein documents in his book Nixonland, one of the ongoing operations of the Nixon White House was the so-called Nixon Network -- "lists of loyalists" put together by the RNC and state and local Republican parties, who were "willing to write on their own or lend their names to ghostwritten missives on items of presidential concern" (p. 363).

Perlstein describes this project as an "obsession" of Nixon's, and indeed, the White House-directed "spontaneous" letter-writing campaigns were mobilized for purposes as varied as voicing outrage at a mildly anti-Nixon gag on the Smothers brothers TV show, to viciously smearing Nixon's enemies. A classic example of the latter was the the famous "Canuck letter" pseudonymously written by a White House staffer and published in the Manchester Union Leader, which falsely claimed that Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie had used an ethnic slur.

The dirty tricks may have started with Nixon, but they certainly didn't end there. Blatant lies and deceitful astroturf operations such as this one (or, as I like to call them, the "assroots") are pretty much second nature for Republicans. And there's a simple reason for this: Republican policies, devoted as they are to slavishly serving the interests of economic elites, are often just not very popular. But to gain support and win elections, creating an illusion of popular support is crucial: thus the Republicans' frequent faux populist posturing and manufacturing of fake grassroots support.

In addition to its basic sleaziness, the thing I find most striking about the McCain campaign's phony letter-writing initiative is how lame the whole business is. Is writing fake letters to the editor really the best use of the campaign's resources? I mean, who even reads newspapers anymore these days? If the campaign wants to plant faux-spontaneous propaganda, they'd probably be better off having their volunteers troll the internet. Or better yet, why not have the volunteers do some good old-fashioned door-knocking and phone banking? It seems to me that would be a whole lot more helpful to their candidate than a bunch of canned letters to the editor in papers nobody reads.

AlterNet is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed by its writers are their own.

Tagged as: politics, mccain, letter writing

Kathy G Runs The G-Spot blog.