by Mark Rhoads
In 1806, Sir Walter Scott wrote "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." All over the country this year we have seen Democrats weaving a tangle web of decieit through campaign trickery of all sorts from offering jobs to candidates to drop out of races to recruiting fake "Tea Party" candidates to openly endorsing minor splinter parties just to "siphon off" votes from Republicans. Most popular of all have been fake robo calls pretending to attribute endorsements to bad candidates or pretending those candidates hold positions they do not hold as in the case of Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Kilbride. But there is good news and that is that more and more of these dishonest campaign tactics of old are being exposed in different media and the perpetrators are getting caught red handed as reporters learn what to look for.
The most fun of all is to watch Democratic-inspired dirty campaign tricks boomerang when they are exposed. Just yesterday, a story came to light that former President Bill Clinton tried to get Florida Rep. Kendrick Meeks (an African-American) to drop out of the Florida race for US Senator in favor of a former white and Republican Governor Charlie Crist who is trying to get Democratic votes away from Meek to defeat a popular Republican nominee and Cuban-American Marco Rubio. Bill Clinton shows his cynnical side to the whole world and how much he really favors electing minority candidates.
In other states media have caught Democrats up to their shoulders in using fake committees and bogus mail box addresses to misdirect voters who want to case absentee ballots or request ballot applications.
So no matter how "clever" some political operatives think their deceptions might be, more and more are getting caught in the act and their actions have boomeranged as the public gets better educated about campaign tricks or election fraud which are two sides of the same problem. Thanks to new people energizing the process in the Tea Party movement, millions of people who were never before active in politics are getting educated about the good and bad campaign practices and how the legislative process works. Millions more, through the internet and blogs and emails, are learning about how bills are amended and camouflaged. They are asking much more sophisticated questions at town halls and are making more informed remarks to the media.
The media will not be able to catch every Democratic trick. There are too many of them. But we are exposing more and more of the old tricks and new voters and activists will be better prepared in 2012 to expect them regardless if they come from Democrats or Republican career politicians who fear the new people because they fear authentic change and not just empty promises of fake change.
