(a) Suppress the vote, limiting typically Democratic voters access to sufficient voting machines, sufficient early voting days, or forcing them to suddenly present never-before required government-issued picture ID's.
(c) Spread blatant lies about your opponent. We've seen this done many times already from the Willard Romney campaign. They have purposely and maliciously edited a tape last year, in which then-Senator Barack Obama quoted the McCain Campaign. Obama stated, "the McCain Campaign actually said, and I'm quoting, if we keep talking about the economy we will lose." They cut the first half of the sentence to pretend that Obama himself was saying "if we keep talking about the economy we will lose."
In another ad, the President said that building a business is not a solo effort. He mentioned inspirational teachers, roads, bridges, and all of the infrastructure that made your business possible. Physically pointing at the "words" he just said, he stated, "if you have a business, you didn't build that," meaning you didn't build all the infrastructure that made it possible. Watch it here.
More recently an ad falsely claims that a bill the President signed would dump the work requirement for welfare, when not only is the requirement still there, but more power was given back to the states to enforce it -- which is what many Regressive republicans, including Willard Romney, requested.
(c) Project your candidate's foibles onto your opponent. This was done in 2004 when they "Swift boated" Senator John Kerry. You may recall that Senator Kerry was a war hero who actually went to Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts. Despite official US Navy records to the contrary, Senator Kerry was accused of inappropriately being given these high military honors. This was, of course, to counteract the fact that the Regressive presidential candidate, George Dubya Bush, who was gently placed into the Champagne Unit of the Texas National Guard, never completed his training there, but rather got drunk and went AWOL in Alabama, never to return to complete his service.
Their candidate failed at military service while the Democratic candidate served in Vietnam and was awarded several military honors. The Swiftboating attempted to convince voters to believe the exact opposite -- that Kerry was anti-military and a phony, while George Dubya Bush was somehow a military hero.
Now, a small group of far rightwing Teabagger-supported Obama-haters are trying to Swiftboat him, pretending that the President "leaked" info about Osama bin Laden's death for "political gains."
According to CNN's National Security Analyst and author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad.:
Obama and his national security team made every effort -- successfully -- to keep the intelligence about bin Laden a closely held secret for almost a year, from the time they first identified what they believed might be the al Qaeda leader's hideout in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistan, in August 2010 until May 1, 2011, when the raid was launched to kill him.
The raid itself was conducted as a covert operation under the overall direction of then-CIA Director Leon Panetta.
I have written a book
about the hunt for bin Laden during the course of which I was the only
journalist granted access by the Pakistanis inside the compound in
Abbottabad where bin Laden was killed. I also spoke on the record about
the hunt for bin Laden with a variety of current White House, Pentagon
and intelligence officials, as well as former Defense Department and CIA
officials familiar with aspects of the story.
None of them divulged classified information about the bin Laden operation. Indeed, they went to great pains to avoid doing so.
What precipitated the
operation going public was not Obama's announcement of the raid but the
crash of one of the Black Hawk choppers used in the raid, which turned
what had hitherto been a covert operation into a very public event.
Pakistani journalists
started arriving at bin Laden's Abbottabad compound soon after the
helicopter crashed and started filing stories about the mysterious
helicopter and its oddly shaped tail rotor. An Abbottabad resident even
tweeted about the unusual sound of helicopters flying over the city in
the middle of the night.
It wasn't much of a leap
for reporters to ascertain that these helicopters had particular
features that had prevented them from being detected by Pakistani radar.
Soon after the SEALs had
raided the Abbottabad command, Pakistani officials on the ground were
interrogating bin Laden's wives and children at the compound who told
them that bin Laden had just been killed. None of this was going to stay
secret for long.
Indeed, it was Gen.
Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's top military officer, who sped up the
Obama administration's announcement of the raid. A few hours after the
raid, Kayani told his American counterpart, Adm. Mike Mullen, "Our
people need to understand what happened here. We're not going to be able
to manage the Pakistani media without you confirming this. You can
explain it to them. They need to understand that this was bin Laden and
not just some ordinary U.S. operation."
Mullen then told Obama
and his national security team, "Kayani has asked for us to go public,"
which swayed Obama to announce the raid sooner than was planned. (Obama
wanted to wait for 100% DNA confirmation that it was bin Laden. At the
time of the president's announcement about the raid the confirmation was
at 95%.)
During his speech to the
nation and world, Obama did not divulge the name of SEAL Team Six,
saying only that a "small team of Americans carried out the operation
with extraordinary courage and capability."
In addition, you may remember watching President Obama deliver jokes at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, smiling and acting as if nothing important was happening -- at the exact moment the most crucial operation of his presidency was being played out in Pakistan. To read more, click here. (Thanks Jim, for the link.)
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