DURING AN INFORMAL press doorstep in Limerick last week, Communications Minister Patrick O’Donovan unleashed both barrels against an unnamed member of the Cabinet. Clearly furious, he railed against anonymous quotes attributed to a Fine Gael minister that had suggested that recent health issues (O’Donovan lives with epilepsy) raised questions about his ability to carry out his duties effectively.
These briefings, he said, were “the ultimate betrayal” – not just of him, but of people with disabilities or those with neurological and other life-altering or limiting conditions. Describing it as a “sad day for Irish politics”, he warned would-be stirrers, “leave my health out of it.”
Hours later, the Fine Gael minister was taken ill and hospitalised, and his party promptly formed a circular firing squad, simultaneously blaming one another other, while also hustling to issue statements of solidarity to their stricken colleague.
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Politicians may come and go, but political dirty tricks are forever. It’s usually a form of stealth warfare, not so much a backstabbing as a slice from an unseen ninja star. It can take the shape of a scurrilous rumour whispered in the right ear, or of a brazenly false accusation of some sort of voter-repelling jiggery-pokery, or else a sly hint which has some element of truth to it to burnish its credibility. But it’s almost always aimed to personally wound the individual, rather than damage the party as a whole.
As the story was propagated by legendary gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, it may be entirely accurate or the product of an acid trip, but Thompson recounts how US president Lyndon Johnson was floundering in his 1948 Senate campaign. His dispirited campaign manager started a discussion about how they can outdo their main opponent, a pig farmer. Johnson was all for telling people the man has sexual relations with his four-legged barnyard friends. A shocked campaign manager was appalled, protesting, “We can’t say that! You know that’s not true!” In response, Johnson shrugged and said:
Of course it’s not true. But let’s make the bastard deny it.
Dirty tricks in politics are as American as baseball. And in the run-up to the 1972 presidential election it was Richard Nixon’s cabal of ruthless henchmen who turned it into an elite sport; his operatives forged and leaked a fake letter to the press, claiming Democratic front-runner Ed Muskie had made derogatory remarks about French-Canadian Americans, calling them “Canuks”. Muskie’s subsequent tearful denial of the story essentially scuppered his run. Using the charmless term “ratfucking”, the president’s men planted false statements and fake news items, hired caterers to ghost Democratic rallies with unpaid bills to cause maximum disruption.
But it wasn’t until a team was busted during an attempt to plant bugs in the opposition’s headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC – most likely an effort to find personal or financial dirt on Democratic candidates – that the skulduggery was exposed, ultimately leading to ‘Tricky Dickie’ Richard Nixon’s dramatic resignation from office in 1974.
But did that unedifying scandal put the kibosh on dirty tricks in American politics? Hell, no. In fact, every presidential campaign since the turn of this century has had copious handfuls of mud flying about – sometimes even within the same party.
An American tradition
During the 2000 Republican presidential primary, a member of George W. Bush’s campaign – believed to be strategist Karl Rove, although he denied it – spread rumors in South Carolina that John and Cindy McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was his “illegitimate black child”, reducing Cindy McCain to tears.
Four years later, a group called Swift Vets and POWs for Truth took one of Republican candidate John Kerry’s claims to fame, the fact that he had served with distinction in Vietnam and turned it into an attack point by claiming that he had lied about his service. It worked – Kerry narrowly lost the 2004 election to George W. Bush. All the allegations were eventually discredited, but the dirty trick even gave birth to a new word, “swift boating,” to describe an unfair or untrue political attack.
There was an effort to ‘swift boat’ Barack Obama in 2011 by the birther movement, which was a false conspiracy theory claiming he was not a natural-born U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible for the presidency. Leading the charge was one Donald Trump who incessantly demanded the release of his birth certificate and then, when forced to eat his words after the document was released, promptly and completely falsely tried to pin the blame on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and pivoted instead to promoting the racist dog whistle that the Obamas are Muslim.
And of course Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2016 was inundated by dog’s abuse and dirty tricks, most notably the bizarre ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory that exploded when online forums baselessly claimed that a leak of hacked internal emails ‘proved’ that she and a cabal of high-ranking Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza restaurant in DC.
A similar leak against candidate Donald Trump, the obscenity-laced misogynistic ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, should have ended his improbable presidential run. But it didn’t, and the rest is misery.
The Irish way
Here in Ireland, political dirty tricks are generally not as flamboyantly vicious. Treacherous shenanigans more usually involve sneaky ‘strokes’ or straightforward front-stabbing, with the most cutthroat arenas often found at local rather than national level politics. Even heaves against a party leader tend to be sudden, chaotic and noisy (Albert Reynolds against Haughey in 1991; the inept rebellion against Enda Kenny in 2010).
However, the dirty tricks deployed during recent Irish presidential campaigns at times make The Traitors look like an episode of Bosco.
In 1990, Fianna Fáil’s Padraig ‘Pee’ Flynn spectacularly broke the main rule of a dirty trick – which was to not get caught doing it. Instead, the minister decided to smear Labour’s candidate Mary Robinson and boost the chances of his party colleague Brian Lenihan snr by going on Radio One and saying the quiet part out loud. Flynn declaring that the female candidate had “new clothes and new hairdo and newfound interest in the family… but, you know, none of us who knew Mary Robinson in previous incarnations ever heard her claiming to be a great wife and mother”.
It was indeed an absolute classic whispering campaign dirty trick. Pee Flynn just forgot to whisper.
As a result, Mná na hÉireann received the message loud and clear.
In 1997, Labour’s Adi Roche wasn’t so fortunate. A well-orchestrated dirty tricks campaign aired spurious claims her brother had been sacked as an army officer in 1969 for alleged involvement in a republican terrorist group – something that turned out to be untrue. Roche trailed in at fourth place in the Áras race and later said she had been “torn apart by the dogs”.
Nor did the winning candidate Mary McAleese make it over the finish-line unscathed. A series of leaked documents detailed conversations she had held with Department of Foreign Affairs officials years earlier. They were used by her opponents to suggest she was a ‘Shinner’ – an incendiary charge (pardon the expression) to be attached to a would-be head of state at the time. Amid the furore, and after journalist Eoghan Harris labelled her “a tribal time-bomb”, McAleese kept her head and embarked on a round of calm media interviews that convinced the electorate she was indeed the victim of a smear campaign.
The 2011 presidential election was the political equivalent of a brawl in a Wild West saloon, with the air thick with hurled accusations, insinuations, invective, denials and handfuls of flung metaphorical mud.
Several candidates claimed – rightly or wrongly – to have been ambushed by dirty tricks: at her formal campaign launch, Independent Mary Davis accused Fine Gael of using polling companies to research attacks on her; during a live TV debate, Independent Dana Rosemary Scallon read out a prepared statement towards the end announcing that a “malicious” and “false” accusation had been made against her and her family in the United States. And then there were the dramatic events around the implosion live on TV of the campaign of then-frontrunner, businessman Sean Gallagher, sparked by a controversial tweet, which sent his campaign into free-fall.
Dirty tricks are only admirable if they are conducted with panache rather than exploiting some class of individual frailty – they should play the ball, and not the wo/man.
Lise Hand: Anonymous digs at party colleagues are sly, but dirty tricks are nothing new in politics
DURING AN INFORMAL press doorstep in Limerick last week, Communications Minister Patrick O’Donovan unleashed both barrels against an unnamed member of the Cabinet. Clearly furious, he railed against anonymous quotes attributed to a Fine Gael minister that had suggested that recent health issues (O’Donovan lives with epilepsy) raised questions about his ability to carry out his duties effectively.
These briefings, he said, were “the ultimate betrayal” – not just of him, but of people with disabilities or those with neurological and other life-altering or limiting conditions. Describing it as a “sad day for Irish politics”, he warned would-be stirrers, “leave my health out of it.”
Hours later, the Fine Gael minister was taken ill and hospitalised, and his party promptly formed a circular firing squad, simultaneously blaming one another other, while also hustling to issue statements of solidarity to their stricken colleague.
Politicians may come and go, but political dirty tricks are forever. It’s usually a form of stealth warfare, not so much a backstabbing as a slice from an unseen ninja star. It can take the shape of a scurrilous rumour whispered in the right ear, or of a brazenly false accusation of some sort of voter-repelling jiggery-pokery, or else a sly hint which has some element of truth to it to burnish its credibility. But it’s almost always aimed to personally wound the individual, rather than damage the party as a whole.
As the story was propagated by legendary gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, it may be entirely accurate or the product of an acid trip, but Thompson recounts how US president Lyndon Johnson was floundering in his 1948 Senate campaign. His dispirited campaign manager started a discussion about how they can outdo their main opponent, a pig farmer. Johnson was all for telling people the man has sexual relations with his four-legged barnyard friends. A shocked campaign manager was appalled, protesting, “We can’t say that! You know that’s not true!” In response, Johnson shrugged and said:
Dirty tricks in politics are as American as baseball. And in the run-up to the 1972 presidential election it was Richard Nixon’s cabal of ruthless henchmen who turned it into an elite sport; his operatives forged and leaked a fake letter to the press, claiming Democratic front-runner Ed Muskie had made derogatory remarks about French-Canadian Americans, calling them “Canuks”. Muskie’s subsequent tearful denial of the story essentially scuppered his run. Using the charmless term “ratfucking”, the president’s men planted false statements and fake news items, hired caterers to ghost Democratic rallies with unpaid bills to cause maximum disruption.
But it wasn’t until a team was busted during an attempt to plant bugs in the opposition’s headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC – most likely an effort to find personal or financial dirt on Democratic candidates – that the skulduggery was exposed, ultimately leading to ‘Tricky Dickie’ Richard Nixon’s dramatic resignation from office in 1974.
But did that unedifying scandal put the kibosh on dirty tricks in American politics? Hell, no. In fact, every presidential campaign since the turn of this century has had copious handfuls of mud flying about – sometimes even within the same party.
An American tradition
During the 2000 Republican presidential primary, a member of George W. Bush’s campaign – believed to be strategist Karl Rove, although he denied it – spread rumors in South Carolina that John and Cindy McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was his “illegitimate black child”, reducing Cindy McCain to tears.
Four years later, a group called Swift Vets and POWs for Truth took one of Republican candidate John Kerry’s claims to fame, the fact that he had served with distinction in Vietnam and turned it into an attack point by claiming that he had lied about his service. It worked – Kerry narrowly lost the 2004 election to George W. Bush. All the allegations were eventually discredited, but the dirty trick even gave birth to a new word, “swift boating,” to describe an unfair or untrue political attack.
There was an effort to ‘swift boat’ Barack Obama in 2011 by the birther movement, which was a false conspiracy theory claiming he was not a natural-born U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible for the presidency. Leading the charge was one Donald Trump who incessantly demanded the release of his birth certificate and then, when forced to eat his words after the document was released, promptly and completely falsely tried to pin the blame on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and pivoted instead to promoting the racist dog whistle that the Obamas are Muslim.
And of course Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2016 was inundated by dog’s abuse and dirty tricks, most notably the bizarre ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory that exploded when online forums baselessly claimed that a leak of hacked internal emails ‘proved’ that she and a cabal of high-ranking Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza restaurant in DC.
A similar leak against candidate Donald Trump, the obscenity-laced misogynistic ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, should have ended his improbable presidential run. But it didn’t, and the rest is misery.
The Irish way
Here in Ireland, political dirty tricks are generally not as flamboyantly vicious. Treacherous shenanigans more usually involve sneaky ‘strokes’ or straightforward front-stabbing, with the most cutthroat arenas often found at local rather than national level politics. Even heaves against a party leader tend to be sudden, chaotic and noisy (Albert Reynolds against Haughey in 1991; the inept rebellion against Enda Kenny in 2010).
However, the dirty tricks deployed during recent Irish presidential campaigns at times make The Traitors look like an episode of Bosco.
In 1990, Fianna Fáil’s Padraig ‘Pee’ Flynn spectacularly broke the main rule of a dirty trick – which was to not get caught doing it. Instead, the minister decided to smear Labour’s candidate Mary Robinson and boost the chances of his party colleague Brian Lenihan snr by going on Radio One and saying the quiet part out loud. Flynn declaring that the female candidate had “new clothes and new hairdo and newfound interest in the family… but, you know, none of us who knew Mary Robinson in previous incarnations ever heard her claiming to be a great wife and mother”.
As a result, Mná na hÉireann received the message loud and clear.
In 1997, Labour’s Adi Roche wasn’t so fortunate. A well-orchestrated dirty tricks campaign aired spurious claims her brother had been sacked as an army officer in 1969 for alleged involvement in a republican terrorist group – something that turned out to be untrue. Roche trailed in at fourth place in the Áras race and later said she had been “torn apart by the dogs”.
Nor did the winning candidate Mary McAleese make it over the finish-line unscathed. A series of leaked documents detailed conversations she had held with Department of Foreign Affairs officials years earlier. They were used by her opponents to suggest she was a ‘Shinner’ – an incendiary charge (pardon the expression) to be attached to a would-be head of state at the time. Amid the furore, and after journalist Eoghan Harris labelled her “a tribal time-bomb”, McAleese kept her head and embarked on a round of calm media interviews that convinced the electorate she was indeed the victim of a smear campaign.
The 2011 presidential election was the political equivalent of a brawl in a Wild West saloon, with the air thick with hurled accusations, insinuations, invective, denials and handfuls of flung metaphorical mud.
Several candidates claimed – rightly or wrongly – to have been ambushed by dirty tricks: at her formal campaign launch, Independent Mary Davis accused Fine Gael of using polling companies to research attacks on her; during a live TV debate, Independent Dana Rosemary Scallon read out a prepared statement towards the end announcing that a “malicious” and “false” accusation had been made against her and her family in the United States. And then there were the dramatic events around the implosion live on TV of the campaign of then-frontrunner, businessman Sean Gallagher, sparked by a controversial tweet, which sent his campaign into free-fall.
Dirty tricks are only admirable if they are conducted with panache rather than exploiting some class of individual frailty – they should play the ball, and not the wo/man.
column dirty tricks Lise Hand October Politics Smoke and Mirrors Irish