Hillary gives in to her dark side

The Clinton campaign has been running a black ops program to convince likely Obama supporters in North Carolina that they aren't registered. Robo-calls, from someone named Lamont Williams, offer to help call recipients register but--oops! oh-oh!--North Carolina's deadline to register has already passed. In fact, most of these voters are already registered, and the calls are aimed to confused them and, the hope is, convince them they can't vote in the primary. Lamont Williams doesn't exist--or rather, there certainly is someone named Lamont Williams somewhere out there, but the calls are really coming from Women's Voices Women Vote, a non-profit run by a slew of former Clinton administration officials and long-time supporters. Undoubtedly, the name Lamont Williams was picked because it sounded a little, I'll say it, black.

Another hallmark of the Rove era in dirty politics--the push poll--has also made an appearance in North Carolina, in the form of some telephone surveys conducted by Garin-Hart-Yang, the firm of Clinton pollster Geoff Garin. The calls "test some messages," i.e. strategies for negative campaigning, and by design leave callers with some "very major doubts" about Obama. This is the goal of push polling. Under the guise of an objective poll, designed merely to collect information, the campaign pumps out lots of negative, innuendo-loaded, and phony messages about its opponent. Karl Rove's most infamous push polling happened in Bush's primary run against John McCain in South Carolina, in 2000, when Rove operatives called voters to ask: "would you be more or less likely to vote for McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black."