Snarls, smears and innuendo as attack dogs get ready for the fray

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The anonymous e-mails and letters began dropping into inboxes and through front doors this summer.

One claimed that Hillary Clinton was having a lesbian affair with Huma Abedin, her beautiful aide. Another online mass-mailing cautioned of the “dark secrets” of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. A blogger claiming to support John McCain said that Rudy Giuliani's wife supported the killing of “innocent puppies”. Flyers appeared on cars accusing Barack Obama of being a Muslim extremist. An anonymous website said that Fred Thompson was a corrupt playboy.
Welcome to South Carolina, the foulest swamp of electoral dirty tricks in America. This state’s primary race has already become the sleaziest leg of the 2008 presidential campaign.

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“South Carolina is a do-or-die state again,” said Rod Shealy, a veteran Republican consultant, over a meal of fried pork and beans in his favourite diner, the Lizard’s Thicket. “The attacks are already coming on a daily basis. And with the anonymity of the internet, we’re going to see new lows in dirty politics that would have been unimaginable recently.”

Mr Shealy knows a thing or two about dirty politics. In 1990, when running his sister’s campaign for lieutenant governor, he paid an unemployed black fisherman facing felony charges to run for Congress to increase white voter turnout. He was convicted of breaking campaign laws.

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After losing badly to Mr McCain in New Hampshire, the Bush team knew – as one operative says – that they had to “chop him up” in South Carolina. Flyers appeared saying that Mr McCain had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman (he and his wife have an adopted Bangladeshi girl). A whispering campaign was started claiming that his five years as a Vietnamese prisoner of war had made him mentally unstable. His wife was a drug addict, people were told in anonymous telephone calls. Mr Bush and his former chief strategist, Karl Rove – another Atwater protégé – always denied any involvement. But Mr McCain’s campaign never recovered.

The brutality of South Carolina’s Republican primaries has until now involved the state’s hatchet men putting the party’s establishment candidate – Mr Bush in 2000 – back on track after upsets in Iowa or New Hampshire. What is different this year is that at least four Republican candidates – Mr McCain, Mr Romney, Mr Giuliani and Mr Thompson – are all heading to South Carolina with a realistic chance of winning the state. That means that the traditional two-man showdown will be replaced by a multi-candidate massacre among a group of men ripe for attack.

“The question this year is not whether the race will be dirtier than 2000,” said Will Folks, the former spokesman for Mark Sanford, the Republican Governor of the state. “The question is, when will it cross that threshold?” The man who masterminded the destruction of Mr McCain in 2000 is Warren Tompkins, known by some operatives in South Carolina as the “God of Hell”. He has been hired this year by Mr Romney. He has already had to answer questions about his tactics.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2917646.ece