Progressive Media Have Really Helped Stop the Spread of Dirty Political Rumors

Everyone can hear it now. This Internet-driven, hyperactive presidential race is forcing accountability on two of the oldest tricks in politics: dog whistles and secret smears.

With a "dog whistle," politicians use code words to signal unpopular stances to one target audience, while avoiding a backlash because the reference is lost on others. Many people miss President Bush's layered language for evangelicals, from hinting that legal abortion is like slavery to his odd prediction that history will see Iraq as just "a comma." (It only makes sense if you know the proverb, "Never put a period where God has put a comma.") Code words don't fool everyone, but from "states' rights" to "welfare queens," GOP campaigns have tapped racial resentment without facing widespread opprobrium. Secret smears run on a similar axis, enabling politicians to undermine an opponent without taking responsibility for the attack. But the times are changing.

From his race to his name, Barack Obama seemed like the perfect target for such coded attacks. Indeed, some Republicans were eager to run the old playbook on him. "Count me down as somebody who underestimates Barack Hussein Obama, please," said GOP strategist Ed Rogers, speaking on MSNBC's Hardball in the headier days of 2006. Yet Rogers, like the McCain campaign, underestimated not only Obama but a new media model that swiftly blasts would-be Swiftboaters.

Partisan and muckraking bloggers now fight political operatives' efforts to keep unseemly attacks below the radar. Take automated "robo" phone calls, which often deploy the sharp attacks that campaigns don't want exposed in the mass media. Previously, the calls were obscure, rarely drawing major media coverage, let alone sustained criticism. Now they can be recorded, uploaded and dissected in a single news cycle. Sites like TalkingPointsMemo and Daily Kos use crowd-sourcing by readers to track the attacks and pin them squarely on John McCain. Insider political sites, like Ben Smith's Politico blog, also disseminate the audio recordings to media and political elites, converting a "targeted" message into a mass broadcast. And organized campaigns like the National Political Do Not Call Registry use the web, Twitter and e-mail to track and map every call.

As a hub for intelligence, the web can enlist people in "bubbling up reports" of everything from robo-calls to US attorney firings, explains TechPresident co-founder Micah Sifry, a web activism expert who heralds the trend as a new era of "crowd-scouring" the presidency. He argues that information can whip around online with or without a political agenda. "Even without central direction, the crowd is scouring the world for interesting news and sharing tidbits constantly."

Once exposed, McCain's robocalls were unpalatable even to his allies in the party and the media, adding another "Hey, Rube" squabble to his already contentious campaign. Republican senators condemned the calls. Fox News's Chris Wallace pressed McCain on the issue, reminding the senator that he once denounced such tactics. Even Sarah Palin felt compelled to respond to criticism of the campaign's robocalls, telling reporters that while she did not renounce them, she would prefer to do personal and retail campaigning instead.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign has run a sophisticated pushback operation of its own, tapping a large volunteer corps through its "action wire" to expose smears and contact local media about unfair attacks. The campaign launched two portals, FightTheSmears and BelowTheRadar, to fight what it calls a stealth Republican operation "to quietly poison voters' information with lies and fear tactics."

All this online activity has been amplified by the rapidly shifting landscape of political television. The increasingly opinionated cable news programs, always in search of conflict and fresh content, now treat debates over these tactics as a major campaign issue. This emphasis is bleeding into the broader campaign discourse, which includes minute dissection of attacks that were once considered unmentionable. A whole range of smears against Obama, for example, have been exposed under the glare of nationally televised debates. Sometimes that process has angered his supporters--as when the ABC News primary debate focused on smears regarding "patriotism" and Islam. In one of the general election debates, CBS moderator Bob Scheiffer was credited for playing a corrective role when he pressed both candidates to answer for attacks from their supporters. That is a stark contrast to the previous two presidential races, when even the most incendiary attacks drew scant calls for accountability at the candidate level.