On the Electronic Campaign Trail

The Washington Post ^ | 1/21/07 | Chris Cillizza and Dan Balz

[steve-b]

By noon on Jan. 10, Matt Rhoades and Kevin Madden knew they had a problem.

The two men handle communications for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's presidential exploratory committee and had been told about a video flying around the Internet that spliced clips from Romney's 1994 debate with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). In it, Romney (R), then running for the Senate in a losing campaign against Kennedy, voiced support for abortion rights and gay rights -- positions he has since renounced.

Romney's political inner circle, alerted to the threat, decided to strike back quickly. Less than eight hours after the attack appeared, a video of Romney rebutting the charges was being sent to his supporters and to Republican blogs.

"In a viral information age, a distortion of the record can quickly sink in as fact," Madden said. "It was very important to show that what was an anonymous attack eventually became a moment of strength for our campaign."

Not long ago, an anonymous video on the Internet would have elicited little more than amusement from the candidate under attack. But the 2006 midterm campaign -- in which then-Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) saw his hopes for reelection, not to mention the White House, torpedoed by his now-infamous "macaca" moment captured on a widely seen video -- changed the rules....

[CharlesWayneCT]

The Washington Post will never tire of using the "offensive" word "macaca", because it was the tool they used to bring down a sitting republican senator.

However, they are correct in their insinuation that Allen screwed up his response. If Allen had done a video immediately explaining his mistake and apologizing, the issue would have gone away. Instead, his campaign chief spent a day making up excuses for what Allen did that were not grounded in facts, thus making it look like Allen knew he did something wrong and was covering it up.

Allen could have still recovered by firing his staff, but I guess he was working on his presidential campaign and thought he needed a big hitter, so he kept him on.

I remember the guy doing phone conference with bloggers telling them all the dirt he had on Webb and how it was going to sink him -- most of the dirt was stupid, most didn't come out, the little that did just hurt Allen more (like the book quote stuff), and in the end Allen's career might be over but the campaign chief will probably just move on to the next race.