Ashley Todd and Donald Segretti

The media will sell you the story that Ashley Todd, the young College Republican who faked her own attack and sexual assault and blamed it on a six foot four African American thug who became infuriated when he discovered she was a McCain supporter, is just a troubled girl. We should allow her to get the help that she needs. Clearly, a woman who fakes an attack and falsely claims to be sexually assaulted is troubled. But she is also part of an organization that celebrates dirty tricks and pranks and provocation. College Republicans are the Delta Tau Chi's of the political world. Whether that is a good thing - and you argue they are just having fun - or a bad thing is a matter of opinion.

Part of the legacy of Watergate is the role young saboteurs can play in presidential elections. One of the minor players in the Watergate scandal was Donald Segretti, a young Republican lawyer who did some nasty things but, in the end, really didn't threaten the Constitution the way the major conspirators did. He was just a punk with a really long leash and $500,000 in Republican campaign funds. Segretti engaged in what he called "ratfucking", which involved, in his case, trying to smear candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1971. He did this, for example, by stealing some letterhead from Edmund Muskie's campaign office, and circulating letters on that letterhead offering false details about Scoop Jackson's sexual preferences. He may have been engaged in a plot to get a black prostitute to seduce Jackson so the Republicans could snap photos. In the end he served four and a half months in federal prison for his misbehavior.

Segretti learned to be a political saboteur while a student at the University of Southern California and, in the process, created the template for similar-minded campus provocateurs everywhere. Their job is to stir the pot, create outrage on campus, poke fun at liberals, annoy people. And, more importantly, learn dirty tricks and pranks and the political value of provocation, so they can carry these lessons into their work as young operatives in the party's machinery. Fascinatingly, Segretti was the California co-chair of John McCain's ill-fated 2000 run for the presidency. You know, the campaign that was derailed by Karl Rove's success in circulating a story in South Carolina that said that McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate biological daughter, the product of an adulterous affair with a black woman. In a weird twist, one of the stories Segretti tried to drop into the 1972 presidential race - one of the things he was sent to jail for - was a tale about Scoop Jackson's taste for young black prostitutes. Now Ashley Todd floats the story that a black man attacked her and assaulted her because she was a McCain supporter.

What do all of these stories have in common? Republicans seem to believe that African Americans, dropped deliberately into a smear campaign - cast in the roles of young seductresses, prostitutes, and street criminals - can derail opponents' campaigns. Lee Atwater derailed Michael Dukakis' campaign with Willie Horton, playing on white America's fear of black crime. This is exactly what Ashley was trying to do. She may be a troubled girl, but she is part of a long troubled history.

[Update 10/27: Nate Silver, over at Fivethirtyeight.com, has an essay about Ashley Todd, linking her story with other stories to reveal the play of responses to Obama's candidacy. Ashley Todd's response - to script a bit of fraudulent street theater designed to remind white voters that blacks are dangerous - is, as Silver carefully argues, directly connected to McCain's efforts to create an "emotional backlash against black people and against Barack Obama." McCain's closing argument is that you can't trust Obama, in part because he is black. I know some of you don't buy this. But consider something that happened yesterday at a rally in Iowa. Sarah Palin had just finished saying:

The lessons I believe we have taught our kids would start to erode. Those
lessons about work ethic, hard work being rewarded and productivity being
rewarded.

Someone from the audienced yelled "And he's a nigger." Why that reminder at that point in the speech? Because, for the fraction of the American public Palin was speaking to, African Americans are imagined to be lazy, living off welfare rather than working, like the rest of us do. We don't want, in Palin's phrasing, "our kids" to start living like they do. Electing Obama would contaminate our culture. We would all become welfare leeches if Obama wins, because his inner-city culture - the culture of black America - would befoul our farmlands and small-towns, the "real" America Palin celebrates. It's the McCain campaign blowing the dog-whistle again, communicating coded messages we don't hear, but racists - like that woman in the audience - do hear and respond to.]