“PHONEY FRED” SITE IS MILD COMPARED TO CONSULTANT’S 2000 EFFORTS

Hardball host Chris Matthews Tuesday went after presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R-Mass.), whose campaign Monday launched a Website attacking rival Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.). The site was quickly pulled once the Washington Post caught wind that Romney’s South Carolina staffers were behind the effort, but it was too late. The move has drawn national ire from across the political spectrum and has brought the previous dirty tactics of Romney’s chief S.C. strategist Warren Tompkins, who worked for President Bush in 2000, back into the limelight.

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UPDATE: The “campaign of sleaze” to which Chris Matthews refers was the one waged against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina Republican presidential primary. It is interesting to note that Warren Tompkins - who was a consultant to George W. Bush at the time - all but admitted responsibility.

Here is the account from Newsweek magazine:

Bush knew the drill: in 1988, after his father had lost in Iowa and barely survived in New Hampshire, his campaign had been rescued by going negative and driving hard right in South Carolina. The architect had been the late Lee Atwater, the infamous bad boy of GOP politics. George W had worked closely with Atwater in that campaign.

Atwater’s right-hand man in South Carolina had been a soft-spoken, deceptively mild-mannered good ole boy named Warren Tompkins. Now Tompkins stood up in the motel room and ticked off the groups they needed to win: the Christian Coalition, the right-to-lifers, the evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention. “We aren’t going to pussyfoot around,” said Tompkins in his whispery voice. “We play it different down here. We’re not dainty, if you get my drift. We’re used to playing rough.” McCain was coming up in the polls. “We’ve got to take this guy out,” said Tompkins. [Emphasis added] Media man Stuart Stevens was delighted with the Bush campaign’s new hard line. He was prepared to make a series of ads that would, as he put it, go “boom, boom, boom.” “Now I can make these attack spots,” he exulted. …

Voters were told that McCain was a liar, a hypocrite, a philanderer and a jerk. They were told he was not a hero at all but a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed or broken in captivity and sent home to betray his comrades in arms. They were told that he had had sex with some of his jailers; that he had married a drug addict; that he had had extramarital affairs, one with the singer Connie Stevens; and that he had arranged a murder to cover his tracks. They were informed that the McCains had adopted a black child (an allusion to their dark-skinned 8-year-old Bridget, whom his wife, Cindy, had brought home from one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages in Bangladesh). They were told that Bridget actually was not Bangladeshi at all but McCain’s own love child, one of several he had sired with American black hookers. They were told that the McCains had to adopt because he had infected Cindy with a venereal disease that destroyed her uterus. [Pumping Iron, Digging Gold, Pressing Flesh: The Favorite Son... Newsweek, Nov. 20, 2007]

Tompkins is now running Mitt Romney’s campaign in South Carolina and apparently Fred Thompson is his latest victim. No one in South Carolina familiar with Mr. Tompkin’s tactics is surprised.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Primary Season, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.