Under the bylines of Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder, the New York Times today published an article looking at the long docket of traffic citations accumulated by 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and his wife, Jeanette, since 1997. A combined 17 citations, noted the newspaper — four for the senator and 13 for his wife.
The piece was instantly controversial, and only in part because folks are questioning the news value of a candidate’s occasional brushes with traffic authorities over the past 18 years:
The Washington Free Beacon chimes in with a post wondering whether the New York Times received its information from American Bridge, which calls itself a “progressive research and communications organization committed to holding Republicans accountable for their words and actions and helping you ascertain when Republican candidates are pretending to be something they’re not.” Opposition researchers, that is.
Brent Scher of the Free Beacon cited Miami-Dade County online records showing that American Bridge had pulled the records. “Neither of the reporters, Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder, appeared on the docket records for any of the traffic citations for Rubio and his wife,” reported Scher. “An additional researcher credited in the New York Times, Kitty Bennett, also does not appear on any of the court records.” The piece’s headline reads, “Democratic Oppo Firm’s Fingerprints on NYT Rubio Hit.”
For his communications director, Jeb Bush is turning to a Republican operative who specializes in opposition research and runs a conservative outfit that has become a persistent thorn in the side of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats running for office.America Rising executive director Tim Miller confirmed Friday that he is joining Bush’s new political action committee ahead of a likely White House campaign. The former Florida governor has been staffing up and fundraising as he explores a run.
[A] BBC documentary titled Digging the Dirt ... was filmed during the 2000 campaign and never aired in the United States. The film centers on a team of Republican opposition researchers —a species that has existed in politics for eons but had recently undergone an evolutionary leap. From deep within the Republican National Committee headquarters the BBC tracked the efforts of this team, whose job it was to discredit and destroy Al Gore.Political campaigns always attempt to diminish their opponents, of course. What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls "votes and quotes"—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival's legislative record and public statements.
Comstock's taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton's top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. "The team we had from 2000," she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, "were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys."
Comstock combined a prosecutor's mentality with an investigator's ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative "storyline" about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. "A campaign is a lot like a trial," Comstock explained. "You want people aggressively arguing their case."
Maligning an opponent, even with his own words and deeds, is a tricky business; voters take a dim view of "negative" politics, and are liable to punish the campaign carrying out the attacks rather than the intended target.
Digging the Dirt provides a rare glimpse of how political operatives have learned to use the media to get around this problem, by creating a journalistic black market for damaging stories. During the first debate between Gore and Bush, in October of 2000, the BBC crew stationed itself inside the RNC's war room, filming researchers as they operated with the manic intensity of day traders, combing through every one of Gore's statements for possible misstatements or exaggerations. The researchers discovered two (Gore erroneously claimed never to have questioned Bush's experience, and to have accompanied a federal official to the site of a Texas disaster), and immediately Tim Griffin tipped off the Associated Press. Soon the filmmakers would catch the team exulting as the AP took the story.
During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC's Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material.