Kautzman’s AP GO PO Blog

Presidential candidate

Main article: U.S. presidential election, 1972

Before the 1972 election, Muskie was viewed as a frontrunner for the Democratic Presidential nomination. The nation was at war in Vietnam and President Richard Nixon’s war policies (and foreign policy, more generally) promised to be a major issue in the campaign.^[2]

The 1972 Iowa caucuses, however, significantly altered the race for the Presidential nomination. Left-wing dark horse candidate, South Dakota Senator George McGovern, made a strong showing in the caucuses, giving his campaign national attention. Although Muskie won the Iowa caucuses, McGovern’s campaign left Iowa with momentum. Muskie himself had never participated in a primary election campaign, and it is possible that this led to the downfall of his campaign. Although Muskie went on to win the New Hampshire primary, the victory was only by a small margin, and his campaign faltered.^[2]

The collapse of Muskie’s momentum early in the 1972 campaign is also attributed to his response to campaign attacks. Prior to the New Hampshire primary, the so-called Canuck Letter was published in the Manchester Union-Leader. The letter claimed that Muskie had made disparaging remarks about French-Canadians – a remark likely to injure Muskie’s support among the French-Canadian population in northern New England. Subsequently, the paper published an attack on the character of Muskie’s wife Jane, reporting that she drank and used off-color language during the campaign. Muskie made an emotional defense of his wife in a speech outside the newspaper’s offices during a snowstorm. Though Muskie later stated that what had appeared to the press as tears were actually melted snowflakes, the press reports that Muskie broke down and cried shattered the candidate’s image as calm and reasoned.^[3]

Evidence later came to light during the Watergate scandal investigation that, during the 1972 presidential campaign the Nixon campaign committee maintained a “dirty tricks” unit focused on discrediting Nixon’s strongest challengers. FBI investigators revealed that the Canuck Letter was a forged document as part of the dirty tricks campaign against Democrats orchestrated by the Nixon campaign.^[4]

Leonard Pitts Jr.
Miami Herald
October 15, 2007

This will be a history of rope.

It strikes me that such a history is desperately needed just now. It seems the travesty in Jena, La., has spawned a ghastly trend. Remember how white students at Jena High placed nooses in a tree last year to communicate antipathy toward their black classmates? Now it’s happening all over.

A noose is left for a black workman at a construction site in the Chicago area. In Queens, a woman brandishes a noose to threaten her black neighbors. A noose is left on the door of a black professor at Columbia University. And that’s just last week. Go back a little further and you have similar incidents at the University of Maryland in College Park, at a police department on Long Island, on a Coast Guard cutter, in a bus maintenance garage in Pittsburgh.

Mark Potok, the director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center told USA Today: “For a dozen incidents to come to the public’s attention is a lot. I don’t generally see noose incidents in a typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year.”

The superintendent of schools in Jena famously dismissed the original incident as a “prank.” It was an astonishing response, speaking volumes about the blithe historical ignorance of people who have found it convenient not to peer too closely at the atrocities of the past lest they be accidentally … moved.

But watching this trend unfold, it occurs to me that maybe what we need here is the opposite of ignorance. Maybe what we need is information. Maybe what we need is a history of rope.

A history of rope would have to include, in 1904, Luther Holbert and his wife, who had their fingers chopped off and handed out as souvenirs. Holbert was beaten so badly one of his eyes came out. It hung by a thread. A large corkscrew was used to bore into the couple’s flesh. It tore out big chunks of them each time it was withdrawn. A rope was used to tie them to a tree.

A history of rope would have to include, in 1917, Rufus Moncrief, who was beaten senseless by a mob. They used a saw to cut off his arms and otherwise mutilated him. The mob hanged Moncrief. Then, for good measure, they hanged his dog. Ropes were used for both.

A history of rope would have to include, in 1918, Mary Turner, burned alive in Valdosta, Ga. A man used a hog-splitting knife to slash her swollen stomach. The baby she had carried nearly to term tumbled out and managed two cries before the man crushed its head beneath his heel. A rope was used to tie Turner upside down in a tree.

A history of rope would include thousands of Turners, Moncriefs and Holberts. It would range widely across the geography of this nation and the years of the last two centuries. A history of rope would travel from Cairo, Ill., in 1909 to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1935 to Urbana, Ohio, in 1897 to Wrightsville, Ga., in 1903, to Leitchfield, Ky., in 1913 to Newbern, Tenn., in 1902. And beyond.

You might say the country has changed since then, and it has. The problem is, it’s changing again.

It feels as if in recent years we the people have traveled backward from even the pretense of believing our loftiest ideals. It has become fashionable to decry excessive “political correctness,” deride “diversity,” sneer at the “protected classes.” Code words sanding down hatred’s rough edge. “State’s rights” for the new millennium. And now, out come the nooses. Just a prank, the man says.

Mary Turner would argue otherwise. I find it useful to remember her, useful to be reminded of things we would rather forget. To remember her is to understand that there is no prank here.

A history of rope would drown your conscience in blood.

David Reinhard
The Oregonian
October 15, 2007

Things must be improving in Iraq, because you don’t read or hear about it as much these days. If things were getting worse – or staying the same – you can bet the big networks and newspapers would be out spreading the news. The prestige media would be declaring Gen. David Petraeus’ surge a bust and dissecting its failure in lavish, even loving, detail.

Now the best anyone can come up with is another story about Blackwater, which simply doesn’t pack the wallop of Abu Ghraib and Haditha. Moreover, the recent fixation on a U.S. security firm operating in Iraq is too obvious. (Come on, guys, everybody sees what you’re doing.) Abu Ghraib and Haditha became incantations of a war gone bad. The mounting war dead became an invitation for throat-clearing “quagmire” pronouncements. Abu Ghraib, Haditha, deteriorating security in Iraq – yeah, those were the days.

Now the nation’s naysayers are left with this: The U.S. military reported last week that troop deaths in Iraq went down for the fourth month in a row, and the Iraqi government reported that civilian deaths declined by half in September.

What to do? Well, CBS and NBC gave the new casualty figures a few sentences on their evening news programs, and the major papers played the news far from their front pages. Only ABC led with the story. In fact, the Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, wondered about the short shrift the media gave this news after four years of “continuously depressing” news. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” he asked the Washington Post’s Robin Wright and CNN’s Barbara Starr whether the news should have received more attention. Perish the thought, they both said – we’re not sure there is a trend yet.

OK, four months is not a trend. But Kurtz then asked the obvious question: If those casualty figures had gone up, wouldn’t that have made front pages? “Oh, I think inevitably it would have,” replied Starr. “I mean, that … by any definition, is news.”

OK, bad Iraq news is news, good Iraq news is not.

Even the bad news out of Iraq isn’t what it used to be. Recall Haditha. In the spring of 2006, Rep. John Murtha said that Pentagon sources had told him Marines there had murdered 24 Iraqis “in cold blood” and that the cover-up of the November 2005 massacre “goes right up the chain of command.” It was, for a season, the “event” that told ever so many all they needed to know about what was wrong in Iraq. Murtha said it happened because our forces are stretched too thin. It was going to be this war’s My Lai – a dark incantation summing up the whole rotten mess, a one-word dirge of our immediate disgrace and inevitable defeat. Haditha, Haditha, Haditha!

All that was missing were … actual facts, completed investigations and court proceedings.

Last week Haditha became not-so-much news. That is, it became good news, which, in the media’s strange calculus of Iraq, is not big news.

A senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, the last ranking enlisted Marine charged in the case. Lt. Col. Paul J. Ware recommended the charges be downgraded to negligent homicide if the case went to court-martial. Earlier he had recommended that all charges be dropped against the two Marines accused of murder in Haditha. His conclusion in all three cases: insufficient evidence.

The New York Times reported the latest Haditha news back on Page 8. In May 2006, the paper had a Page One story declaring that “Military Expected to Report Marines Killed Iraqi Civilians.” Front-page charges, back-page exonerations. “Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of Marines came to light,” The Times’ Paul von Zielbauer wrote Saturday, “it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity.”

Perhaps Haditha did produce this war’s defining atrocity, just not in the way so many once imagined. Rushing to accuse Marines of murdering two dozen Iraqi innocents “in cold blood” and alleging a cover-up “right up the chain of command” before the facts are known – using the alleged massacre to serve your pet theories on the war’s conduct or your anti-war stand when the conflict is going poorly – this could be the war’s “defining atrocity” if the progress on the ground reported recently is sustained.

I know, let’s get back to Blackwater.

By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 15, 2007; C01

STRAFFORD, N.H. — There’s no mistaking which house on Lake Shore Drive, about 45 minutes northeast of Manchester, is the one full of Paulites — the intensely loyal, almost fanatical supporters of Rep. Ron Paul. Signs are everywhere. On the back window of a brand new black Toyota, on the bumper of a green Geo, on a white Volvo station wagon that sits beside a beat-up lime green Honda. “Ron Paul 2008.”

“We can run the whole New Hampshire campaign right here,” says Jim Forsythe, 39, a former Air Force pilot who’s on his driveway in jeans, T-shirt and white socks. “We’re the hard-core supporters.”

Like Paul himself, the Paulites are against the war in Iraq, against the growing federal bureaucracy, against the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Education, the income tax, against, as Forsythe says, “politics as we’ve known it.”

Inside Forsythe’s kitchen, snacking on spinach dip, there’s Kelly Halldorson, 34, a mother of three whose first presidential vote went to Bill Clinton. And Jane Aitken, 58, a retired art teacher who voted for President Bush in 2000 and 2004. And Will Albenzi, 28, a security guard who’s gotten so disillusioned with the Republican and Democratic parties that he belongs to neither.

And this being the Granite State, the first primary state famous for its independent “Live Free or Die” attitude, there’s Chris Lawless, a 38-year-old software technician who’s followed Paul’s career since 1988, when the obstetrician-turned-congressman ran for the White House as the Libertarian Party nominee.

In a state where Patrick Buchanan upset Bob Dole, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, more than a decade ago, anything is possible, says Andrew Smith, a pollster and director of the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center. As of last November, 26 percent of New Hampshire’s electorate were registered Democrats and 30 percent were Republicans. But the biggest block of voters — 44 percent — were undeclared. Forty percent to 45 percent of those, Smith says, leaned Democrat and 25 percent to 30 percent Republican.

But whatever their backgrounds, the Paulites have catapulted a Republican candidate often described “eccentric,” “unknown” and a “long shot” into a spotlight. Paul may be the candidate who has tapped into that independent and frustrated portion of the electorate that in every race is looking for a third way.

This month, the 10-term Texas Republican stunned the GOP field by raising a little more than $5 million in the third quarter, 70 percent of it from online donations; Sen. John McCain, once considered the front-runner for the GOP nomination, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who placed a strong second in the Iowa straw poll in August, raised $6 million and $1 million, respectively. For months now, Paul has been the most popular GOP candidate on the Web, with more supporters on MySpace, Facebook and Meetup than Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney, who won the Iowa straw poll and leads in the polls here.

“Everyone — the staffers in the other campaigns, the bigwig political observers in the state — is scratching their heads. They don’t know what to make of this Ron Paul phenomenon,” pollster Smith says. A University of New Hampshire poll last month showed Paul at 4 percent in the state. The most recent Washington Post-ABC News national poll, also from last month, had him at 3 percent. “The other campaigns aren’t worried that he’d win the primary. They just don’t know who his supporters are and whose support he’s taking away,” Smith adds. “His poll numbers aren’t high now, but it’s only October. And they could see him getting 10 percent of the vote here. If you get 10 percent of the vote in a crowded field, well, you might finish third.” But the Paulites are aiming for higher than third place.

Last week, they gathered at Forsythe’s house to watch the latest GOP presidential debate. Forsythe is the most recent Paulite convert of the bunch. The father of two heard Paul speak in February and remembers how he derided big government and unnecessary wars. Says Forsythe, an aerospace engineer: “That really got me. I fought in Bosnia, Somalia and Iraq, the Iraq before this Iraq war.

“I just couldn’t believe a politician was talking about these things,” he says. “And the thing is, what’s going on with Ron Paul, what he’s tapping into, speaks to how much the Republican Party has lost its way.”

* * *

Paul isn’t using the Internet. The Internet is using him.

Yes, the 72-year-old’s main headquarters sits in a nondescript office building in Arlington. But his real headquarters may be on the Web, where Paulites have organized, raised money and created buzz, all independent of the official campaign. Take Meetup. There are 994 Ron Paul Meetup groups, more than all the other candidates in both parties combined, and New Hampshire has four, the largest being Forsythe’s. The group’s name is HQNH, and its 418 members have their own Web site, where Forsythe is the blogmaster. Kate Rick, one of Paul’s four staffers in New Hampshire, says HQNH is the candidate’s most effective grass-roots operation, handing out literature at gun shows, holding up signs at fairs and canvassing. Rick should know. She helped start HQNH.

Some quarters of the blogosphere have obsessed over Paul’s intense online following, but things kicked up early this month when Paul announced his third-quarter fundraising figures. Unlike the rest of the presidential field, Paul has consistently improved on his money haul, taking in $640,000 in the first quarter, $2.4 million in the second and $5.1 million two weeks ago. At least two-thirds of the donations, his aides say, came from the Internet. New Hampshire gave the most money per capita, according to the campaign, and the most dollars from one area came from Los Angeles County.

“This is the first politician I can truly support, ever,” says 53-year-old William D. Johnson, who runs a law firm in downtown L.A. and has donated the maximum, $2,300. A former Democrat, he switched to the GOP because of Paul. “I don’t agree with all his positions — he’s not as strong on environmental issues as I’d like — but because of his record you know that he’s a man of utmost integrity.”

There are shades of Howard Dean here, the way the insurgent Democratic candidate embraced the Web in 2003. And shades of McCain, too. The Arizona senator raised $1 million in two days online in 2000 after beating Bush in the New Hampshire primary.

But the most fitting analogy, political analysts here say, might be Patrick Buchanan. Though Paul has not been a general in the culture wars like Buchanan, both men come from the old right of the GOP, pols who champion limited government and fiscal conservatism. Buchanan was barely registering in the New Hampshire polls months before his surprise defeat of Bob Dole in 1996.

“As surprising as Ron Paul’s popularity is, you see where it’s coming from. In an election in which a party doesn’t think it will win — and a lot of Republicans here have a perception that no matter the nominee, they’re going to lose next year — voters have an opportunity to vote with their gut,” says the University of New Hampshire’s Smith. “But what Ron Paul has to overcome is this image that his supporters are people with tinfoil hats on, folks on the fringes of society. I’m not saying that’s the case, though that’s the story line that the media has on him.”

Adds Matt Lewis, a blogger and director of operations at the conservative site Townhall: “He’s connecting online, no doubt about it. His antiwar and anti-big government message — in a time of war and big government — is carrying through. But how is all this money, all this online popularity going to translate to actual votes come primary day?”

With $5.3 million in his coffers, Paul is planning to spend more money in New Hampshire, his aides say. He’s visited the state five times, they add, and recently bought his first radio spot. But the campaign is looking past New Hampshire, opening offices in Arizona, Utah and California. In July, the campaign had 10 staff members. Now it has 45.

In an interview, Paul says: “To be honest, I didn’t think we’d be in this position, getting this kind of attention, having this kind of money. I tell my staff, ‘Don’t get bloated. Be careful with the money.’ I’ve been saying the same things for a long time. But now more people seem to be listening.”

* * *

Just how far do Paulites go to show their support?

Some stamp their money with RON PAUL. Others wear T-shirts that read: “Who is Ron Paul?” There are men who carry little Ron Paul cards and drop them on top of urinals, no joke. “You have to get creative. Sometimes guys need something to read in the bathroom,” says Chris Richards, 38, who works in finance. Sometimes a Paulite gets too carried away and walks 38 miles — from Dover to Concord, a day-long trek — to campaign for Paul. After watching television pundit George Stephanopoulos tell Paul that he would bet his “every cent” that he won’t be president, Halldorson, the 34-year-old mother of three, got so frustrated that she grabbed some campaign literature and handed it out all day. A video is up on YouTube.

“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘What’s wrong is right and what’s right is wrong?’ ” Aitken, the retired art teacher, asks. “We’ve been doing things that are so wrong for so long that the right thing for some might feel freaky. Sometimes you have to stop and think, ‘Okay, this is my conviction.’ “