November 2008
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Useful amateurs:
How the smearing of Barack Obama got crowd-sourced
Ken Silverstein is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine. His new book is Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship.
The ongoing character assassination of Barack Obama cannot be called the most vitriolic such effort in history, nor the most vulgar. Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic- Republican Party paid writers and political hacks to ridicule the Federalist incumbent, John Adams, as a “hideous hermaphroditical character.” Congressman Davy Crockett accused the candidate and eventual president Martin Van Buren of having a fetish for women’s clothing (“He is laced up in corsets”). It will be hard to surpass the campaign of 1876, when Republican Rutherford Hayes accused his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden, of having picked up syphilis from a prostitute; in turn, Democrats accused Hayes of shooting his mother after a night of boozing. (In the end, Hayes stole the election by rigging votes in three southern states.)
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