by Alan Huffman
They then lay out a fairly half-baked strategy, telling us to pay particular attention to the officeholder’s voting record, which actually comes as something of a surprise because it sounds legit. I’d have been less surprised if they’d said they wanted us to stake out his car-crushing business down by the river. They don’t really know what they’re looking for, or even how they intend to use it. They just know they want to know what there is to know. Mo tells us they need a quick turnaround (none of our clients ever wants a leisurely turnaround) and, without further ado—no one even rises from his chair, much less offers to shake our hands—sends us on our way, back outside to our waiting police car.
The cops are leaning against the back fender, smoking cigarettes. As I open the door to get in, I glance over my shoulder and see the Statue of Liberty in the distance—her back, appropriately enough—which is something I hadn’t noticed coming in. I see Michael looking at it as well, and I know we’re thinking the same thing: This is America. As weird as politics may be, as cutthroat as it can become, as entangled and seemingly nonsensical as it sometimes is, there’s no place where it works better.
Driving back to the PATH station I tell myself it doesn’t matter whether we like these guys. We deal in actualities. The guy we’re researching is not an enemy. We don’t even know him. Our job is simply to discover and evaluate the facts. Whether there’s a silver bullet that’s going to put him in his political grave is beyond our control; we can only make our best effort. It makes no difference how much a campaign or a guy with a mole wants us to find something if there’s nothing useful to find. But when you go after a guy with the clout that this New Jersey officeholder carries, you better be prepared to go all the way, because the consequences of timidity or incomplete action can be devastating.
As we undertake our research over the next week, we find that the guy has a decades-long voting record, a lengthy list of campaign contributors and a host of personal financial records to plow through. We eventually tie him to legislative efforts that may have exploited the atmosphere of crisis in the post–9/11 world, which would require a lot of spin to get traction. He also has a questionable record on immigration as it relates to homeland security, for what that’s worth. Like many politicians, he has accepted large campaign contributions from industries he’s helped through support for various pieces of legislation, and has taken big chunks of money from developers whom he’s assisted with government subsidies. But this is New Jersey, for God’s sake. Rather than feel relief when Mo suggested we look at his voting record, we should have recognized the reality of the situation—that when guys like Mo and his cohorts plan to hang their hat on something as mainstream as a voting record, there probably isn’t going to be much there.
Two weeks after our waterfront meeting, we wrap up our final report. There’s some good stuff there, but honestly, not enough to make a serious dent in the candidate’s political future—not in a place like Jersey City. The big ones may fall harder, but slinging a rock heavy enough to bring them down takes a lot of muscle. Our guys, we soon find out, don’t have it. I’m finishing up the report and Michael’s been on the phone with them for only a few minutes when he hangs up and says simply, “Forget about this. We’re done.”
“Cold feet?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “They said it didn’t matter anymore, but yeah, they got scared.”
“Did you tell them we’d already finished the report?”
“They didn’t care,” he says. “And one more thing: They’re not going to pay us.”
“Oh, they’ll pay,” I say. “We’ll see to that.” Our business mantra is: We always get paid. Who wants to make enemies of the oppo guys? We’ve got all the inside information.
A few weeks later, after we’ve gotten a lawyer friend to send Mo a very carefully worded demand letter, Michael makes a follow-up call. It’s very brief, and at one point he appears to be cut off in midsentence. Then he slams the phone down.
“What’d they say?” I ask.
“Well, they basically told me if we wanted the money we could come back up there and try to get it,” he says. “I’m thinking we probably won’t do that.”
As it turns out, the Jersey boys had neither the balls nor the wherewithal to bring the big guy down, and as far as they’re concerned, we’re lacking in the same departments when it comes to going after them. It’s true; we relish neither the thought of getting further entangled with the Jersey City political machine, nor going to court, and thereby publicizing the fact that we went after a big-name politico. We’d probably lose anyway.
In fact, Jersey City remains the only instance, to date, that we’ve been stiffed on a major job. We later read that one of the guys in the smoke-filled room had been charged with taking bribes. At least he got paid.
Chapter 4
Michael
Our friends don’t generally understand what we do. Saying “political research” doesn’t adequately explain how Alan ends up being placed under guard in a municipal office, or how I spend a late night in a basement watching a candidate’s ballroom dancing skills. Neither of us is known for being particularly enthralled with politics in our normal lives; like many Americans we glean our political news from The Daily Show. We don’t watch C-SPAN. From our perspective, most of what passes for political discourse in the country today is dry, didactic, self-important, shrill or sensational, tinged with a new type of radicalism that often makes little sense. Even worse, much of it isn’t based on facts, or even on what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.”
We’re not in the political debate business, though we often find ourselves being dragged into debates when someone discovers that our jobs have something to do with politics.
“So what do you think about the new Supreme Court nominee?” someone will ask me at some party.
“Never easy to choose one,” I say.
“Don’t you know it’ll be bad for abortion opponents?”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” I answer. “But the Saints seem to be doing great this year. Do you think they’ll get to the Super Bowl?”
Alan can be even more off-putting. I’ve watched him being asked a political question, think for a moment as if on the cusp of an answer, and call me over, saying, “Have you met my business partner, Michael?” Then he promptly walks away, leaving the cycle to begin again.
Politics for us is confrontational only during our on-duty hours when the responsibilities of the job often demand it, such as with the New York clerk. And though we do house opinions on many issues, we don’t generally share those with others. To do that introduces a dynamic in which no one ever wins. When we’re working, we rarely feel any ill will toward the parties involved. Neutrality is key to objectivity regardless of party affiliation. Like Michael Corleone told his brother in The Godfather right before he shot two people dead, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”
Have Alan and I ever had some in-depth conversation with one another about our political philosophies? Not that I recall. That doesn’t mean we think or even live the same way. Alan resides in the country in an 1830s plantation house; I live in a downtown high-rise. He has a keen eye for the repetition of history as it relates to government and politics. It may look like something new, he’ll say, but beneath the surface it’s simply a reconstituted version of the same old picture show. Between the two of us, he is probably the more liberal, which likely stems from the fact that I was raised in a staunchly conservative Republican family in a Republican city in a Republican state. To this day, my family will tell you that they still don’t know what happened to me. Yet, some of that upbringing has stayed with me, providing a useful balance to an occupation that could lend itself to one-sided values.
Alan and I tend to see things a little differently from most people, in part because we just see things differently and in part because of the nature of what we do. For us, oppo is about human nature as much as politics. It’s mostly an excuse to scrutinize
ambitious people, to fully reveal their stories down to the most awkward details, all while getting to know America, and the unique and sometimes strange people who inhabit it, one pointed question at a time. We like rolling into towns unannounced to ask those pointed questions, from Miami to Seattle and points in-between, and we like occasionally going off track, such as when we got lost in a creepy neighborhood outside Cincinnati where the streets are lined with small, doll-like houses that from all appearances are inhabited exclusively by aging, shirtless fat men who sit on tiny porches and stare at nothing.
Being opposition researchers has freed us to research a range of characters—in some ways, even more so than in our previous lives as daily newspaper reporters. We’ve become immersed in a side of politics that tends to remain hidden from public view: the process by which candidates are systematically dissected, evaluated and prepared for potential public attack. There are fundamental differences between what we do and investigative reporting, of course. We don’t need a firm lead to justify undertaking our investigations, and we do not publish the results of our work. Though we have a clear agenda, in that we’re beholden to our campaigns, we’re free agents when it comes to uncovering the truth. We’re deeply vexed by what Colbert calls the “fact-free zone” and are, of necessity, relentlessly objective, because there’s no need for sycophants in the realm of opposition research.
Everything we cite in our reports must be thorough, honest, accurate and, as we can’t stress enough, documented. Whether our candidates know it or not, the last thing they want is for us to bowdlerize their record, or to have the opposing campaign reveal a weakness that we have not discovered first and forewarned him or her about. Despite the obvious differences, and the fact that we contribute to the campaign’s portrayal of their opponent’s record, our essential objectivity positions us closer to investigative reporters than to spin doctors.
We stick to the facts even when we’re tempted to opine, which is difficult when the person we’re researching is really out there. It’s hard to hold our tongues when a candidate, for example, says of abortion that liberals would take our children and “flush them down the toilet.” Or says his opponent doesn’t want our children to know about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Or supports a school abstinence curriculum that advises students to wash their genitals in Lysol to help prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Those kinds of comments sting us.
Our strenuous reviews of everything from township council minutes to congressional hearings can be as boring as a C-SPAN marathon. Yet there is always the promise of meaningful discovery and of interesting characters—the borderline psychotic clerks, the borderline psychotic candidates, the gossipy waitresses, the hired thugs, the elderly men operating out of a historic jail in Liberty, Missouri, who were clearly intent on controlling our minds. In short, there is always America.
We start each day, as most people do, on the Internet, which is a great source of ideas and leads. Unfortunately, it’s also wildly unreliable. You can, after all, edit Wikipedia yourself. We use the Internet as a roadmap and, when possible, a source of documentation, but ultimately, all our information must originate from someplace real—someplace you could actually go if you had the time, inclination and perhaps a rented Hyundai.
Naturally, some of what we gather in the field is later wrapped in colorful cellophane and packed in confetti to make it look tastier than it is. Some of it is rotten by the time it gets to you, and if you’re smart you’ll immediately throw it out. There are a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong. Do not blame us for any of that. Our hope is that by illuminating the process of opposition research you will be better positioned to cull the good from the bad. Politicians and their minions have been prone to lying since the first ambitious Cro-Magnon jockeyed for control of a mastodon hunt, yet never before has there been a system for broadcasting untruth as sweeping and effective as the combination of television, talk radio and the Internet. It’s important to listen closely, and skeptically.
As opposition researchers Alan and I are, admittedly, attracted to lies; we savor revealing them for what they are. But it’s distressing to see how political lies have adapted to public scrutiny, much the way shape-shifting infections in industrial hog farms respond to tanker truckloads of antibiotics being dumped into the coursing veins of millions of host swine. The purveyors have become increasingly effective despite increasing access to the facts, in part because of the successful use of dazzle camouflage—whereby complicated imagery is superimposed on the truth to fool the eye.
A fairly recent example of this phenomenon is the candidate in New York who was called to task for sending out mass e-mails containing racist depictions of the president as well as a video of a woman having sex with a horse. You can Google it if you really need to know his name, which, again, is not the sort of information Alan and I typically retain for long. More important than his name is how his campaign responded to the controversy over his e-mail. They characterized the revelation as part of an attack campaign by his opponents, who were clearly more concerned with bestiality than with the real issues of the day, such as the economy. The idea was to associate the problem with the opponent, to cast the messenger in doubt, despite the obvious. In his case, it didn’t really work, but it sometimes does.
Arguably, the entire effort to invade Iraq in 2003 was based on dazzle camouflage. Only when the camouflage was stripped away—too late—was the truth revealed, and by then the effort had succeeded, at least in its original intent. And President Bill Clinton undertook numerous high-profile military campaigns (in Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan) while Congress was debating his impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair, and another (in Serbia) after he was acquitted, which some critics said closely paralleled the movie Wag the Dog, in which a fictional president uses a fake war to distract the electorate from a sex scandal. (Of course, that movie was reputedly based on President George. H. W. Bush’s launching of the Persian Gulf War to deflect criticism of his administration in preparation for a reelection bid.)
Dazzle camouflage is most effective when its practitioners are skilled, when the outrage factor of their infractions is low, or when the voters simply hate their opponent more. In such cases, the candidate can be dressed up as pretty much anything, and no one seems to care. “Dazzle camouflage” isn’t something we made up, by the way. The Allied Navy developed it during World War I, when the advent of airplanes and submarines reduced the ability to hide battleships using conventional camouflage. The goal was to trick the enemy’s visual range finders through the use of confusing geometric designs that made it hard to estimate the ship’s size, speed or direction.
Politically, the goal is to render the enemy—in this case, you, the undecided voter—unsure about what you’re seeing, and by extension, about what really matters. Our job is the opposite of this. Our job is to clarify the ship’s size, speed and direction; to illustrate, through incontrovertible facts, that this or that candidate has or does not have what it takes to lead you, for very specific, verifiable reasons. This occasionally does require special glasses, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try it at home.
We view our research through the prism of our background in journalism, because that’s how we were trained, but it’s up to the campaign whether to make use of that. Either way, our backgrounds influence how we gather information and organize our findings. Most of the time our work is comparatively solitary, punctuated by the odd interview with the candidate, the campaign manager and perhaps an approved source or two. The work itself comes through word of mouth, and it’s safe to say that there are only a handful of people who operate the way we do, though there are big names within both parties who sometimes help orchestrate opposition campaigns. It’s hard to accurately quantify how often such research succeeds in killing a candidate’s bid for office, or, conversely, electing a candidate, because so many factors come into play, but there are a few obvious examples, such as the downfall of presidential hopeful John
Kerry as a result of the much-maligned, yet effective, swift boat campaign, and of fellow presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis as a result of the Willie Horton affair. What you may not know is that it has also been used to derail the political aspirations of a guy running for the school board in South Jersey. Oppo is done, literally, all over the map, and in every stratum of politics—if the desire and the money are there.
Opposition researchers have a penchant for discovering weakness, but we also keep our eyes peeled for the rare example of strength, even honor and valor, that emerges from the ruins. Somewhere between roaming the waterfront of Jersey City in the backseat of an unmarked police car, and discovering a guy in the Midwest making loans to his own campaign while simultaneously reducing child support payments to his daughter, we find a different America—an America where anything can happen politically, where a criminal can be reelected mayor of DC and where a caring and dedicated nurse with no political experience can kick ass at the polls. Meanwhile, the rest of the world watches anxiously as the United States veers crazily from one election to the next.
Chapter 5
Alan
Michael and I happened on the Palais de Pal on a warm winter day in 1988, at the dock of a lake that until recently had been a cow pasture in Fulton, Mississippi. Fulton is the seat of Itawamba County, whose claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Tammy Wynette, though for us it’s more memorable as the temporary mooring of the Palais and as the location of the Sands Motel, where an impressive stand of old-growth mildew inspired Michael to wear his socks in the shower.
Itawamba County made the national news in 2010 after the school board canceled the high school prom because two female students announced their intention to attend as same-sex dates. After the ACLU filed suit, the school board scheduled what was later characterized as a diversionary prom for seven students, including the lesbians and two students with learning disabilities, while the other kids danced and snapped cell phone pics at a secret location. Good times! So you can imagine that if twenty-two years earlier you had been a disoriented, slightly judgmental and, it must be said, flamboyant houseboat traveler from Chicago, you could have picked a far better place to become stranded.