"Push" This, Crazy Curt!

Tom Ferrick, Jr.’s column in the Inquirer yesterday confirmed that the Weldon campaign has plunged to new depths.

Dastardly push polls need to get heave-ho

The nastiest invention in the increasingly nasty world of political campaigns is something called "push polls."

These are calls made to voters, ostensibly by public opinion pollsters, that ask loaded questions. An example: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for candidate John Smith if you knew he beat his wife?"

Your answer, of course, is "no." The caller may pretend to mark that reply down, but that's just a ruse. His sole purpose is to spread a nasty rumor that harms candidate Smith.

Push polls are bad - as in, evil - in three ways:

They are anonymous. The voters never know who paid for the "poll."

They are deceptive. The poll isn't a legit public opinion poll at all. It is a way of spreading rumors.

They are ugly. Often, the information they seek to spread is false or vastly distorted.

Push polls began to surface in the 1990s. The most famous was one used in the 2000 presidential campaign when campaign operatives, allegedly for George Bush, devised one to stop the surging candidacy of U.S. Sen. John McCain. They launched a push poll in South Carolina, right before the Republican primary there, that asked: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"

The allegation was a lie. But it did serious damage to the McCain candidacy. To add to the irony, McCain and his wife had recently adopted a Bangladeshi orphan.

Which brings up the polling being done in Delaware County's Seventh Congressional District. I've gotten e-mails and calls from readers who speak of a "poll" that asks a series of leading and negative questions about Joe Sestak, the Democratic candidate. Sestak is running against incumbent U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, in what promises to be a close fight.

Among the questions asked: Would you be more or less likely to vote for Sestak if you knew he was (in so many words) a tool of the trial lawyers, pro-abortion, soft on terrorism, and a guy who let Osama bin Laden get away?

Sestak is a former Navy admiral who served at sea, in the Pentagon, and in the White House during the Clinton administration.

As my colleague Todd Mason reported recently, the polling was being done by a group called Venture Data L.L.C., which is based in Salt Lake City.

Michael Puppio, Weldon's campaign manager, told Mason that the polling company was not working for the Weldon campaign.

That statement is correct as far as it goes. Venture Data does not appear on Weldon's campaign reports as a vendor, but a company called Progressive Opinion Strategies L.L.C. does. It got $17,000 from Weldon's campaign committee in March. The clips reveal that Progressive and Venture are often aligned in polling operations.

Most of the people who got the Venture Data calls (and communicated with me) thought they were strange. Some thought they were offensive.

Frankly, I don't think they were push polls in the classic sense of the word. Most push-poll calls are short and come right before an election. These are long and are being done far in advance of the November election.

Instead, they are legit polls conducted by the Weldon camp that are doing "push questioning" - they are market-testing negative messages about Sestak to see which ones get the "hottest" response. In turn, that will shape Weldon's fall media campaign.

Which, as you can guess, is going to be ugly.

If political advertising, by mail and the airwaves, resembles anything today, it is a slasher movie.

At the risk of repeating myself (and, after 800 columns, one tends to), I think negative advertising has done more to harm democracy that the commies ever did.

But with so many close, big-money races in the region, it will be hard to escape it this fall.

A Nightmare on Elm Street, coming to a mailbox near you. Saw II arriving soon on local cable.

God help us.

This great post from Down With Tyranny gives you more background on Creepy Curt and what challenger Joe Sestak brings to the table in the campaign, and I think Joe makes his case against Weldon pretty well here, particularly this excerpt.

"...(Weldon's) ethical issues are his to discuss with the citizens of this district. I want to talk about the issues. I do think, though, they are indicative as you talk about some of the places where he had contact of how he has become more interested as a Representative to visit places like North Korea, 30 trips to Russia, Libya, Bosnia - and not his home district.

I mean I think that's the crying shame. He forgets that national security really begins at home. It begins in the health, the education and the economic promise of the people and their children here in the district. How can he vote down there in Congress to lay 46,000 people off of healthcare just before Christmastime? How can he vote for billions of dollars in college education grants and scholarships to be cut just before Christmas?

My take on it is the Secretary of State is paid to worry about the world. We want our Congresspeople to be knowledgeable, but what we also want them to do is to recognize that at home is where they need to focus.

Able Danger... I can tell you as a former Navy officer that Curt Weldon again has missed the boat. I established Deep Blue, the Navy's first anti-terrorism group right after 9/11, reporting directly to the chief of the naval operations, the head admiral of the Navy. And under his direction we tried to change the policies, the programs, the resources from what we traditionally were applying them to to the Global War on Terror. And I can tell you that Able Danger - much like the 9/11 Commission and Republicans like John Lehman have said - is much ado about nothing. That's in our wake.

Sure, we want to learn lessons. But what we need to do is focus on the future of the people here who truly do not have the proper healthcare, the proper education security, the proper economic security. How can we ask them to sacrifice for this nation if Representatives like Curt Weldon, voting with President Bush's policies, don't address those types of issues?

Also, I want to point out that Sestak, as a Navy admiral, did not dictate the deployment or tactics of ground forces in either Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan, with one of the latter two as the probable location of Osama bin Laden. So for Weldon to imply through push polling that Sestak “let bin Laden get away” is not only malicious and inaccurate but, from a standpoint of military strategy, operationally impossible.

Given Weldon’s terrible record in Congress and borderline-lunatic conduct (the farcical WMD “search,” the “Able Danger” fiasco and his sickening attempt to smear Sestak through the illness of Sestak’s daughter, as Down With Tyranny noted) is it any wonder that Weldon has resorted to this odious tactic?