One of Sen. John Kerry's celebrity supporters is ready to pull out all the stops to get him elected. Republicans are shrieking over a suggestion by rocker Moby that Democrats spread gossip about President Bush on the Internet. "No one's talking about how to keep the other side home on Election Day," Moby tells us. "It's a lot easier than you think and it doesn't cost that much. This election can be won by 200,000 votes." Moby suggests that it's possible to seed doubt among Bush's far-right supporters on the Web.
"You target his natural constituencies," says the Grammy-nominated techno-wizard. "For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.
"Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, 'What's all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?'"
Moby didn't claim that he believed the abortion story.
Last month, Bush did propose reforms to immigration policy. But he insisted, "I oppose amnesty, placing undocumented workers on the automatic path to citizenship [because it] perpetuates illegal immigration."
Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson likened Moby's proposal to "dirty campaign tactics we're already seeing from John Kerry."
"His campaign was willing to use these kinds of voter suppression tactics against members of his own party in Iowa and New Hampshire," Iverson says. "John Kerry is a hypocrite. He pledged to run a clean campaign. Then he uses the lowest form of gutter politics to impugn his opponents, Democratic and Republican. It's unfortunate but this is probably just the beginning of the kind of tactics we're going to be seeing from John Kerry in the months to come."
Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said, "I doubt that Moby was suggesting anybody suppress the vote. We did not use any dirty tactics against any candidate.
"When it comes to dirty tricks the Republic party wrote the book. We've already seen Republican attacks and we haven't even won the nomination yet. The Republican Party is clearly afraid of John Kerry."
I hope you are right. The second amendment is my most important issue.
This stuff would be trivially easy for Bush to defuse. He could make them look like raving idiots in thirty seconds, and walk away from the microphone smiling, with millions of supporters across the country cheering for him.