When I first read news stories about the 20,000 emails written by Democratic National Committee staffers and officials, I thought, “It’s deja-vu all over again!” Some of the dirty tricks proposed by Hillary supporters with the DNC to play on Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump seemed positively Nixonian.
During the 1972 presidential election, Nixon’s operatives sought to trick the Democrats into nominating the weakest possible candidate for president—South Dakota Senator George McGovern—by using dirty tricks to discredit McGovern’s two main rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Minnesota Senator (and former Vice President and 1968 Democratic presidential nominee) Hubert Humphrey, and Maine Senator (and 1968 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee) Edmund Muskie, widely considered the Democrats’ strongest candidate against Nixon. For example, Nixonites forged letters purportedly from Muskie riddled ethnic slurs and accusing Humphrey of drunk driving and using prostitutes. For good measure they spread rumors about Muskie’s wife, provoking Muskie to denounce the smear campaign so heatedly that questions were raised about his emotional stability. Whether McGovern would have won the Democratic nomination without Republican intervention is unknown. But he did win the nomination—only to suffer one of the worst defeats in the history of presidential general elections, winning less than 40% of the popular vote and carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in the Electoral College.
So—what were Hillary’s supporters with the Democratic National Committee planning? One idea was to spread rumors that Bernie Sanders, born a Jew, was an atheist—a ploy they hoped would reduce his popularity among Democrats who are Southern Baptists and thereby induce them to vote for Hillary, a Christian. See https://theintercept.com/2016/07/22/new-leak-top-dnc-official-wanted-to-use-bernie-sanderss-religious-beliefs-against-him/.
And in a spirit of bipartisanship, dirty tricks planners also discussed attacks on Donald Trump. Aside from planning, and apparently implementing, peaceful protests against him, they discussed running ads on the internet to recruit women willing to be kissed, groped, and otherwise humiliated by Trump. A copy of an email proposing the content for a nice, salacious, juicy fake ad can be found here: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/12803.
What did Hillary know, and when did she know it? We can’t yet say. In all fairness to her, it must be acknowledged that there is not yet any evidence that she knew what her supporters were up to. And in fairness to the DNC’s merry pranksters, there is not yet evidence that they actually followed through with any of their planned stunts. Moreover, to the credit of the planners of this week’s Democratic National Convention, Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Chairman of the DNC, whom Bernie Sanders has long (and apparently accurately) accused of pro-Hillary bias, has been dropped from the convention’s program and may be stepping down from her chairmanship at the end of the convention (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hacked-emails-cast-doubt-on-hopes-for-party-unity-at-democratic-convention/2016/07/24/a446c260-51a9-11e6-b7de-dfe509430c39_story.html).
Incidentally, the above-cited article also says Hillary’s campaign manager is blaming this particular email mess (as opposed to the email mess at the State Department) on Russian President Vladimir Putin, arguing that Putin hacked the DNC to gain access to the emails so that they could be released on the eve of the Democratic National Convention to sow dissension between Clinton and Sanders supporters, weaken the Democratic Party, and increase Trump’s chances of victory this fall. The accuracy of this theory remains to be seen. So far, Putin remains inscrutable.
Perhaps less inscrutable is Richard Nixon himself, who is merely, uh, dead. Notwithstanding his current status, it’s not difficult to imagine him somewhere, somehow, studying the email mess and smiling at the irony of it all. After all, Hillary’s first position in government was on the staff of a congressional committee investigating Nixon’s dirty tricks. But whether he’s smiling down, or up, is a different issue.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville and taught politics and government at Tarleton since 1987. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990 to the present). He was Mayor Pro Tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He is a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and the Stephenville Rotary Club, and does volunteer work for the Boy Scouts of America. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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