McCain Campaign's Ghost Letters To The Editor

By Cernig

I don't know if it's illegal but it for damn sure is immoral:

I spent a morning in John McCain's Virginia campaign headquarters ghost-writing letters to the editor for McCain supporters to sign. I even pretended to have a son in Iraq.

..."You can be whoever you want to be," says an inviting [McCain campaign worker] Phil Tuchman. "You can be a beggar or a millionaire. A mom or a husband. Whatever. You decide!"

...The assignment is simple: We are going to write letters to the editor and we are allowed to make up whatever we want -- as long as it adds to the campaign. After today we are supposed to use our free moments at home to create a flow of fictional fan mail for McCain. "Your letters," says Phil Tuchman, "will be sent to our campaign offices in battle states. Ohio. Pennsylvania. Virginia. New Hampshire. There we'll place them in local newspapers."

Place them? I may be wrong, but I thought that in the USA only a newspaper's editors decided that.

"We will show your letters to our supporters in those states," explains Phil. "If they say: 'Yeah, he/she is right!' then we ask them to sign your letter. And then we send that letter to the local newspaper. That's how we send dozens of letters at once."

No newspaper can refuse a stream of articulate expressions of support, is the thought behind it. "This way, we will always get into some letters column."

First McPoints for blog commenters, now this. Is there a single part of the McCain campaign's outreach on issues that is honestly come by?

Comments

[yarrrr]

She's a Dutch Obama doner? Don't believe anything you read in Salon...

[Steve Hynd]

No, she's a Dutch journalist who was working undercover in both campaigns and Salon just reprinted her story. It's at the top of the Salon page.

[anderson]

A flow of fiction is exactly how the rest of the McCain campaign has been run.