Narrative Push Back on McCain Campaign Themes

by anderson

The themes of the McCain campaign are simple. Two of them lately have stood out amongst others: voter fraud by ACORN will steal the election, and McCain and Palin love "real America," which comprises small towns and small town folk. These folks are real Americans and are people who happily do not inhabit, nor have any wish to inhabit, big city freak zones, which are nothing but barren sectors of seething anti-Americanism. Narrative push back has since appeared across a spectrum of news outlets.

Now that Stephen Colbert has tagged the ACORN voter fraud narrative as a joke, a number of recent stories have created a narrative push back against the GOP and the McCain campaign that has all but neutered the ACORN attack.

Firstly, Republican operative Mark Jacoby was arrested in California for voter registration fraud, having fraudulently registered himself and then committed further fraud by registering others while being falsely registered. It is also alleged that he "duped" voters into registering as Republicans, for which his firm, Young Political Majors (YPM), were paid per GOP registration. YPM was hired by the California Republican Party, which claims the arrest was "politically motivated."

Secondly, and though the story came out several months ago, CNN is re-presenting the case of convicted Republican election fraudster, Allen Raymond, who published an expose, How to Rig an Election, Confessions of a Republican Operative, detailing his 2002 role in election fraud in New Hampshire. Allen and Republican party official James Tobin were both convicted, but Tobin won on appeal (Tobin has recently been indicted again for making false statements to a federal agent). New Hampshire GOP chairman, Charles McGee, also served seven months in prison for the same scheme.

Thirdly, though it seems off the American mainstream media radar for now, Murdoch's own The Times, opened up another narrative front with the story about Republican voter registration fraudster Nathan Sproul and his firm Lincoln Strategy (a name I feel certain Lincoln would not appreciate).

John McCain paid $175,000 of campaign money to a Republican operative accused of massive voter registration fraud in several states, it has emerged.

As the McCain camp attempts to tie Barack Obama to claims of registration irregularities by the activist group ACORN, campaign finance records detailing the payment to the firm of Nathan Sproul, investigated several times for fraud, threatens to derail that argument.

The documents show that a joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the Republican National Committee and the California Republican Party, made the payment to Lincoln Strategy, of which Mr Sproul is the managing partner, for the purposes of “voter registration”.

Mr Sproul has been investigated on numerous occasions for preventing Democrats from voting, destroying registration forms and leading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to leach the Democratic vote.

The Republican National Committee previously paid Sproul's earlier voter suppression firm, Sproul and Associates, over $8 million in 2004 for "voter registration" activities in several states that workers testified were scams which sought to register voters and then discard Democratic registrations. Sproul and Associates instructed workers to "act as if they were non-partisan, to hide that they were working for the RNC, especially if approached by the media."

On the theme of small town "real America," a narrative push back has created quite a furor, with the story that the Republican National Committee has spent $150,000 on Sarah Palin's debutante appearances. This included big city shopping sprees of $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York, a Nieman Marcus binge in Minneapolis of $75,062 and hair and makeup expenses of $4,716 during the month of September. Bloomingdales and Barney's in New York City, den of big city iniquity, also made the shopping hit list, as did men's store, Atelier, where $4,902 in fashionable accoutrements were most likely dropped on the first dude. Karl Rove protege, robocall expert Jeff Larson, whose company FLS, slimed McCain in the 2000 GOP primary, is shown on FEC documents as one of the purchasers extraordinaire.

While the big city spending by the RNC on Sarah Palin is an obvious ode to Republican disingenuousness, right wingers, as can be expected, are crying foul, or at least wondering what all the fuss is about. Which is nothing if not hilarious, considering the obsession they had with John Edwards' haircut. Now expressing befuddlement over this "latest kerfuffle," right wingers then wondered whether the Edwards' haircuts were not, in some manner, "a disguised form of campaign money laundering," and that Edwards' haircuts really did demonstrate that there were "two Americas." Ed Morrissey's long ago lament:

I guess there really are Two Americas. One believes that it contributes to presidential campaigns to support electoral events and efforts, and the other thinks that those contributions can go to personal grooming and luxurious living....

Money that people send to his campaign for his election should not go to his hairstylist and manicurist. If Edwards has this kind of judgment about his campaign contributions, imagine the kind of judgment he will have about federal funds while in charge of the executive branch.

Yes, imagine.

Nonetheless, what we are seeing is an obvious narrative IO push back against the recent McCain campaign themes, and it may render these inoperative in the waning weeks of the campaign. Unfortunately for McCain, his campaign doesn't have much left.