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August 30, 2003
Original Astroturf
We've heard a lot about "Astroturf" in the last several months. The term refers to "artificial grassroots" support for the President's plans and policies. Typically, GOP Team Leaders are sent a copy of a letter for them to sign their own name to and send to their local paper to see if they can get it published in the "Letter's To The Editor" section. The goal is to make it look like there are a lot of people out there who support the President's aims strongly enough that they are willing to take the time to compose and send their own letter to their local paper - except it's not their words, or their time that went into writing it - it's just a "sign and send" thing, more akin to the petition letters used by many activist groups that are sent directly to politicians.
Why does who it's sent to make a difference in how one might feel about these practices? Well, one crucial difference is that the Astroturf is being sent to hundreds of different papers around the nation, all over different signatures. The different publishers may not know (at least not until or unless they start getting several copies of the same letter over and over again) that this is a piece of pure propaganda and not the actual thoughts of one of their citizens. As a result, the GOP essentially gets free advertising from the paper. Rather than having to buy ad space to make their point in their own specific words, they just get supporters to send those same specific words in to the papers and see how widely they can get them printed.
When a group of people send identical letters to a single politician or even a group of politicians, however, the effect is different. While these letters come in on individual sheets of paper or as individual emails, the effect they have is more like a petition - where you would have one sheet of paper with a single message on it, and tons of signatures under it. More important, however, is the fact that these letters, which are sent to the politicians who's views the senders are trying to sway, aren't being used to try and pitch any group or party's "party line" to the general public, and the group or party that organizes the campaign doesn't get the free advertising out of it. If they want their message in a newspaper, they'll have to go out and pay for it like everyone else, rather than just trick a newspaper editor into running it for free.
As I mentioned earlier, I've been re-reading "All the President's Men" recently, and have been stunned, angered and depressed by some of the similarities I've seen between the Republican party of the early 1970's and the one I've seen in the last several years. I even found what looks like an early attempt at "Astroturf" - though in this case, the Republicans did actually pay for the space - they just made it look like it wasn't them doing it.
[Woodward is speaking to a "well-placed Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP) officer] "Remember the decision to mine Haiphong about 5 months before the election? Some of us felt that decision could make or break the President. We spent $8400 on false telegrams and ads to stir up phony support for the President's decision. Money was used to pay for telegrams to the White House, to tell the President what a great move it was, so that [Nixon Press Secretary Ron] Ziegler could announce that the telegram support was running some large percentage in support of the President. Money also went to pay for a phony ad in the New York Times"Of course, the first thing that I thought of when I read that passage was the phony little "riot" staged by GOP staffers from DC who were flown in to Florida to intimidate Date County into ending their recount of the ballots during the 2000 Election.He took a copy of the ad out of his desk and handed it to Woodward. Headlined "The People vs. the New York Times," the advertisement criticized a Times editorial that had opposed the mining.
"Notice," the man from CRP said, "it is signed by about ten supposedly independent people, leaving the impression that citizens are up in arms about the editorial, and are willing to fork over several thousand dollars of their own money to express their opinion. Not so. The ad was paid for by CRP with forty of those $100 bills from the pile in [CRP Finance Chairman Maurice] Stans safe."
A line in the advertisement ran: "Who can you believe -- the New York Times or the American people?"
Old habits die hard, I guess?
UPDATE: Reading a bit further, I find that the CRP also rigged a poll that station WTTG was running on the mining issue. Apparently, the station put "ballots" in the Washington Post and the Washington Star - and according to James Dooley, a 19-year-old who worked in the CRP newsroom at the time
"The Press office ran the project, " Dooley said, "and work ground to a halt. Everyone had to fill out fifteen postcards. Ten people worked for days buying different kinds of stamps and cards and getting different handwriting to fake the responses.... Thousands of newspapers were bought from the newsstands and the ballots were clipped out and mailed in."When Woodward called the McGovern campaign for what, if anything, they had done, they said the idea of rigging the poll had not occurred to them at all.At a minimum, Dooley said, 4000 ballots supporting Nixon's decision were sent from CRP. WTTG reported that 5157 ballots agreed with the President and 1158 disagreed. Had the CRP ballots not been sent in, the President would, at best, have lost by one vote - 1158 to 1157.
"When all the ballots were clipped," Dooley continued, "people became afraid the newspapers might be discovered, so someone said, 'Shred them.' McCord was in charge of the shredder and he was upset about a tun of newspapers all over the shredder room .... But all the newspapers were destroyed as directed."
Woodward called CRP spokesman Devan Shumway and asked if they poll had been rigged. "When you're involved in an election, you do what you can, " Shumway replied. "We assumed the other side would do it also. On that assumption, we proceeded. I don't know what the other side did." [Emphasis mine]
Obligatory Disclaimer: I have no doubt the Dems have pulled some similar tricks. However, I am unaware of any examples, nor have I seen anything so far that leads me to believe that the intent to create the image of phony public support by the Democrats comes anywhere close to reaching the same scope as that demonstrated by the Republicans.
Posted by thorswitch at August 30, 2003 05:12 AM
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