On The Question of Aggressive Tactics

Submitted by Rick Perlstein on August 18, 2007 - 12:49pm.

Kathy G, a brand-new foul-mouthed fem-blogger on the scene (subbing for Ezra Klein), asks a question:

[W]hy aren't Democrats doing more to aggressively discredit the Republican candidates? It's essential that we shape the negative narratives about those bozos right now, before it's too late. Yet none of the operatives on our side seem to be doing that. Why is it that the Republicans always seem to be thinking and planning at least three steps ahead of the Democrats?

This provides me a great opportunity to post something I've wanted to share for some time. Murray Chotiner is the gnarled, amoral troll who taught Richard Nixon everything he knew about running campaigns and the art of political destruction. Before going into politics, he was a lawyer specializing in representing loan sharks. Conspiracy theorists have always found it suspicious that he died in a car crash during the Watergate investigation. It's always been my conviction that progressives need not be gnarled, amoral, nor trolls in order to learn some things about how to win from people like Chotiner, things that far from compromising ethics, represent instead a belated refusal to unilaterally disarm in the face of shrewder conservative tacticians—people like Murray Chotiner; and also the man who is very much his spiritual heir, Karl Rove. Some of this stuff is just basic lessons in martial maneuver.