Tony Feather is one good reason to expect the Missouri race in particular to be as dirty as they get.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0510.wallace-wells.htmlOctober/November 2005
McHenry's first full-time job in Washington was with the conservative communications group DCI. It was quite a choice. If there is a center to Washington conservative dark arts, DCI is pretty much it. They were paid consultants, for instance, to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth last year, although they are most known for attacking fellow Republicans. DCI's founder is Thomas Synhorst; his expertise lies in “astroturfing”—developing fake grassroots groups to front for conservative and corporate causes—and “push-polling,” a subtle technique that can impart damaging information about a rival candidate in the guise of a hypothetical question for a poll. Synhorst conducted, for instance, push-polls for Bob Dole's presidential campaign in 1996, in which Iowans were asked if they would be more or less likely to vote for Steve Forbes if they knew that the candidate had a “promiscuously homosexual father.”
This was McHenry's political finishing school. The recent graduate started work at DCI's New Media division in the fall of 1999; his main project was running a Web site, NotHillary.com, which peddled rumors that Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2000 in order to drum up conservative campaign contributions. Meanwhile, DCI was working for Karl Rove; Synhorst's group helped defeat Sen. John McCain in South Carolina that year with a series of notorious push-polls that, among other things, called McCain “a liar, a cheat, and a fraud.” By June, with McCain no longer a factor and Bush breezing towards the nomination, McHenry used his connections to get an interview with Rove, who hired him to be the National Coalition Director for the Bush-Cheney campaign.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A11277-2004Jan12January 13, 2004
After nearly three decades of working for GOP candidates in Missouri and surrounding Midwest states, Feather is emerging as a Washington power broker, thanks to some friends named Karl Rove, Joe M. Allbaugh, Ken Mehlman, Donald L. Evans and Jack Oliver, his colleagues from President Bush's 2000 campaign, for which he served as political director. . . .
Feather started his own consulting firm, FLS-DCI, in 1999, with two other Republican operatives, Jeff Larson and Thomas J. Synhorst, to provide direct-mail, telephone and grass-roots lobbying for political parties, individual campaigns, corporations, trade associations and ideological groups.
After the 2000 election, the firm started a lobbying offshoot, the DCI Group, that set up shop in Washington, almost immediately acquiring a long list of clients paying $20,000 to $200,000 every six months. Feather registered as a lobbyist for AT&T, General Motors and the Teamsters union.
By that time, Feather had just finished working in the Bush campaign, which reunited him with Rove, whom he had first met in 1974 when Feather took a course in campaign management taught by Rove. Now, nearly three decades later, the Web site of his firm boasts an effusive endorsement by his mentor. "I know these guys well," Rove said. "They become partners with the campaigns they work with. From designing the program to drafting scripts, from selecting targets to making the calls in a professional, successful way, they work as hard to win your races as you do."
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