Laurence Lowe is a senior editor at Triple
Canopy whose articles have appeared in GQ, The New York Times, and
n+1.
In my TNR profile
of John McCain's then-recently installed chief of campaign operations Steve
Schmidt, I briefly alluded to a lowly tactic the message guru used back in
1996, when he sent out 60,000 'sex surveys' that attempted to portray
then-Congressman Tim Roemer as someone who was using health
surveys to pry into the sex lives of adolescents. Schmidt was 25 years old at
the time and just getting started in politics. But after yesterday's release of
a deeply misleading, McCain
campaign-approved ad depicting Senator Barack Obama as an advocate for
"comprehensive sex education" for kindergarteners, that episode in
Schmidt's history is worth re-visiting.
Schmidt's
candidate--an Indiana state senator named Joe Zakas--was trailing in the polls
when, one week before election day, Schmidt seized on Roemer's vote for a July
1991 amendment to produce a mailer labeled "Tim Roemer's Sex Survey."
(One of the 60,000 Indiana
3rd congressional district voters who received the mailer described
it as "two pictures of Roemer, two gays embracing, a cover of the current
Playboy and--between the gays and the Playmate--a cover of the Bible. Something
bad about his values, I guess.") That amendment was overwhelmingly
approved in the House, and the questions that Zakas would not say aloud at a
press conference because of their "graphic sexual nature" had to pass
both an ethics review board and a peer review board before they could be
included in what were, after all, health
surveys.
From
South
Bend Tribune,
November 6, 1996 (only available on Nexis, so no link):
Steve Schmidt, campaign
manager for Zakas, said the mailings, though strongly worded, were designed in
part to create "some controversy in the final week" and force Roemer
to engage Zakas directly in a campaign give-and-take.
Schmidt said he never saw a
campaign in which the incumbent refrained as Roemer did from hitting back. He
said the strategy was a risk for Roemer and whether it paid off would remain
uncertain until the votes were tallied.
"We never went after
his personality," Schmidt said. He said all of the attacks were based on
Roemer's voting record.
Roemer contended that the
survey mailing was "for the most part sleazy and highly inaccurate."
Fast
forward twelve years. We're two months out from Election Day, and Schmidt's
candidate is running neck-and-neck with his opponent. On those two counts (and
too many others to name) the circumstances are quite different. Yet Schmidt has
just authorized an ad whose brazenly misleading message is strikingly similar
in conception to the sex surveys.
After
running through a number of suspect attacks on Obama's education record, the ad
ends with a graphic citing a vote he cast in March 2003, followed by a picture
of Obama that can only be described as creepy and the narrator asking:
"Obama's one accomplishment? Legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex
education' to kindergartners. Learning about sex before learning to read?" Here it is:
The legislation in
question, though, was actually an amendment to pre-existing sex-education standards. It
even included an opt-out clause for parents. When asked about the amendment
last year, Obama said that sex education should be "age appropriate"
for kindergarteners, and his campaign later released a statement saying that
the framers of the legislation were thinking along the lines of a component on
"inappropriate touching." But never mind all that: The McCain
campaign is strongly implying that Barack Obama would subject a kindergartner
to a "comprehensive sex education" in lieu of reading lessons.
Even
for a campaign that, under Steve Schmidt's leadership, has sought to associate
its opponent with Paris Hilton and has recently been playing particularly fast
and loose with the truth, this ad represents a dismal new low.
--Laurence Lowe