Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [58]
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The Heartwarming Story of the Very First Push Poll
Lee Atwater, a mentor to both Karl Rove and George Jr., ran the first push poll in 1978 against a friend of mine, Max Heller. I met Max and his wife, Millie, in Hilton Head in 1994. His intelligence, good humor, and obvious decency reminded me of my father, who had recently died.
Max told me his story.
In the late 1930s, Millie and her family left South Carolina for a vacation in Austria where she met Max and fell in love. Millie and her family went back to South Carolina and the two lovebirds kept in touch. When Hitler invaded Austria, Max decided it might be time for him to become an American.
Arriving in Charleston, Max was greeted by Millie and her dad, who offered him room and board. Max refused to accept a handout and insisted on doing a day’s work, sweeping out Millie’s dad’s warehouse before he would sleep in their guest room and eat at their table. Max and Millie married and prospered. Eventually he became the beloved mayor of Greenville, and in 1978 ran for Congress against an Atwater client, Republican Carole Campbell.
Heller was ahead until Atwater commissioned a series of polls to discover how voters in the district would feel about “a foreign-born Jew who did not believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior.” (The polls revealed a certain antipathy to such a person.)
Max lost.
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Push polls are a sneaky way to spread lies about your opponent while appearing to keep your own hands clean. To my knowledge, McCain has not fathered any illegitimate children of any race. He and his wife Cindy did, however, adopt a Bangladeshi girl, Bridget, who has dark skin and appeared regularly with her parents at campaign events, thus granting the rumor an especially sinister veneer of plausibility. Nice work, Bush campaign!
(By the way, I myself suggested a retaliatory push poll to a friend in the McCain camp. It went like this: “Hi, we’re an independent polling company. If you knew that, during the five and a half years that John McCain was being tortured in Hanoi, George W. Bush snorted five and a half kilograms of cocaine, would you be more likely to vote for Governor Bush or less likely to vote for Governor Bush?”)
Other rumors about McCain that began circulating around this time were that he was gay (he’s not); that he was pro-abortion (he isn’t); that his wife had outstanding arrest warrants for giving alcohol to minors (she didn’t); that he had voted for the largest tax increase ever (he hadn’t); that he had been reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee (he hadn’t); and that he had fathered an illegitimate child with a North Vietnamese woman, which was why he’d gotten special treatment from the Viet Cong. (This one’s true. McCain’s illegitimate child John McCain Vu Khaon is currently Minister of Bicycles of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.)
Despite the fact that the sliming of McCain could have benefited no one but Bush (and possibly the distant also-ran Alan Keyes, who himself was facing allegations of having fathered three black children), the Bush campaign repeatedly protested its innocence.
However, in a candid moment captured by C-SPAN on February 12, Dubya tipped his hand to South Carolina State Senator Mike Fair. They didn’t know the camera was on them as they spoke about McCain.
SENATOR FAIR: You haven’t hit his soft spots.
BUSH: I know. I’m going to.
FAIR: Well, they need to. Somebody does, anyway.
BUSH: I agree. I’m not going to do it on TV.
The mastermind behind Bush’s dirty tricks campaign in South Carolina and beyond was a man by the name of Karl Rove, whose fleshy and formless physique belies a heart as cold and steely and deadly as a discarded refrigerator with the door still attached.1 Rove, whose official White House title is Senior Political Advisor, has so much influence over the President that he’s been described as “Bush’s brain