South Carolina Nastiness

It's unquestionably true that the same South Carolina dirty tricksters who stopped John McCain's Presidential bid in 2000 are out this year. The latest revelation is that Mike Huckabee's army of robo-callers and push-pollers are spreading that McCain supports experiments on unborn children. Actually, Huckabee's outfit is push-polling all his Republican rivals in the state. There is one charge specific to McCain, however: a mailer from a group called "Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain. It's pretty weak stuff, accusing McCain of collaborating with his captors. Only thing is, the mailer wasn't mailed anywhere.

Recently, the group sent a mailer to approximately 80 newspaper editors in South Carolina accusing McCain of selling out his fellow POWs in Vietnam. On Tuesday, the McCain campaign (which is working hard to appeal to vet voters) made one of McCain's former fellow POWs available to the media to respond to the smear. The story, picked up by the AP and Wall Street Journal among others, got national play -- undoubtedly more play than the group would have been able to get on its own.

I spoke to the founder of Vietnam Veterans against John McCain, Jerry Kiley, yesterday. He told me that the group hasn't "actively sought donations at this point," and that the next step for the group will be mailings "going out to our network," with the intention that the mailing would then be forwarded on to local media there. The group just doesn't have the funds to send mailings directly to voters -- nor, as they declared they would in their statement of purpose, to run radio and TV ads. Things "could change," he told me, "if we received a sizable donation," but he wasn't holding out much hope.

Instead, they're planning "an email campaign." Groups of like-minded vets throughout the country will get the email chain started, he said, "so it will spread very quickly throughout the country."

So, this is an unfunded group trying to get some media attention. The McCain campaign went nuclear on it, to "prove" that groups are out to get him in South Carolina. I have to say that this is NOTHING compared to what Rove and the boys did to McCain in South Carolina last time. That was an establishment attack. These are a few guys with a flyer and some time on their hands. The question is, does McCain run the risk of over-publicizing this smear to the extent of it actually rebounding back on him?