Hardball: How Politics Is Played Told By One Who Knows The Game by Chris Matthews

Author:Chris Matthews [Matthews, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1999-11-02T05:00:00+00:00

Method No. 1: Catch ’Em in a Lie.

Some of the most memorable campaigns in history have been won by the victims of slanders. In each case, what swept the election was the successful counterattack, the cleverness in calling “Foul!”

In 1970, Senator Frank Moss of Utah was charged by his Republican opponent with supporting violent demonstrations by students against the war in Vietnam. Moss destroyed the man by running full-page newspaper ads displaying a letter he had sent to the young demonstrators supporting their objective but urging them to avoid violence. Across the top of the page the headline read: “Here’s the Famous Letter.” It won the election.

Another case in point was the 1982 senatorial campaign in New York.

Earlier that year, the electoral prospects of the incumbent, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were not promising. The Republicans, fresh from their 1980 landslide, were planning to nominate an extremely attractive young opponent who had made a reputation in the House of Representatives as a tough critic of the liberal establishment, Speaker O’Neill in particular. Disrespectful of seniority, this young Republican firebrand seemed to relish hitting those who were highest on the political ladder. They made good targets for a political gunslinger trying to make his mark.

Moynihan, the erudite academic, was the best target of all. His inflection came from Harvard Yard, his liberalism from Hell’s Kitchen. To Republicans, he was the worst of all worlds: liberal, intellectual and a big-city Democrat ever alert to his party’s demanding constituencies.

But Moynihan did have certain political assets. One of them was his chief of staff and press secretary, Timothy Russert, who recognized that an effective way to counter one assertion, in this case that the Senator was too soft toward the Soviets, was to catch him lying in another. Scouting the opposition for the ’82 campaign, Russert began noticing that the hotshot Republican challenger, so schooled in political attack, was a little fuzzy defining his own past. The problem revolved around his war record.

Certain discrepancies began to surface in the young hero’s account of his service. As a congressional candidate in the late 1970s, he had emphasized his desk jockey job at the Pentagon as a whiz-kid planner in the nation’s conversion to a peacetime economy. Identifying with the post-Vietnam transition, he seemed to be making himself an agent in the winding down of the war itself.

In the more hawkish 1980s, a different color began to glow in the self-portrait. Now the nation was reeling from the Iranian hostage-taking. The country was in a Rambo mood, and the young “veteran” was riding the Zeitgeist. Suddenly his literature began portraying him not as a Pentagon pencil pusher but as a real-life soldier, who might actually have gotten his hands dirty in ’Nam.

Russert began sorting through the candidate’s speeches, press releases and news clips. Working with a yellow legal pad, he systematically marked down every fact put out about the other fellow’s record until a blatant pattern emerged. The Pentagon intellectual had been purely a paper John Wayne. The truth was actually closer to the earlier portrait.

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