This report in WaPo is discouraging, if it turns out to be true:
A secret effort to influence the 2017 Senate election in Alabama used tactics inspired by Russian disinformation teams, including the creation of fake accounts to deliver misleading messages on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of voters to help elect Democrat Doug Jones in the deeply red state, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.
But unlike the 2016 presidential campaign when Russians worked to help elect Donald Trump, the people behind the Alabama effort — dubbed Project Birmingham — were Americans. Now Democratic operatives and a research firm known to have had roles in Project Birmingham are distancing themselves from its most controversial tactics. …
Recent revelations about Project Birmingham, however, have shocked Democrats in Alabama and Washington. And news of the effort has underscored the warnings of disinformation experts who long have said that threats to honest, transparent political discourse in the age of social media are as likely to be domestic as foreign.
It efficacy has not been ascertained as of yet, but that’s not really the point, because the up front question has to be Is this the right thing to do?
Now, we know what Trump operative and Mueller target Roger Stone would say:
Roger Stone is pleased to be known as a campaign “dirty trickster.” A former Trump campaign aide and Republican operative, he has embraced his past as practitioner of the political dark arts. “One man’s dirty tricks,” he has said, are “another man’s political, civic action. He has warned that “Politics ain’t bean bag, and losers don’t legislate.” Going still further, he has articulated as one of his “rules” for success that “To win you must do everything.” Yet he has also insisted that, “Everything I do, everything I’ve ever done has been legal.” [Bob Bauer, Lawfare]
His bald embrace of the old lie that “all’s fair in politics” is why I think Stone comes across as one of the more loathsome members of our national political soap opera. A willingness to discard social norms, to engage in deception, in the name of victory has a long history of short-term earnings but long-term disaster.
And this, apparently, is a large part of this Project Birmingham, allegedly run in support of underdog Democratic candidate, Jeff Jones, for the Alabama Senate seat of Jeff Sessions, in which Jones very narrowly defeated Republican former Alabama Supreme Court Justice (twice removed for cause) Roy Cooper. If true – and this has not been verified, so far as I understand it – then this willingness to use deceptive tactics pioneered by the Republicans has two repercussions of vast importance.
First, it tars the Democrats, to some extent, with the black, gooey stuff that already obscures so many Republicans. This is tragic because the Republicans have not been showing wisdom in their governance, but rather ideological rigidity, which is to say allegiance to positions that are becoming clearly false, such as lowering taxes will induce riches. Democrats, on the other hand, are willing to investigate and debate new ideas and toss out ideology that has proven false. Tarring themselves with deception can do them no good.
More importantly, though, is the negative impact on the entirety of politics. I’ve been disturbed of late at the FB posts suggesting that all politicians lack the code of ethics we should expect of them (this includes those with the message that term limits should be imposed, which tends to serve the goal of ensuring our legislatures are smothered in well-meaning amateurs, self-centered gold-diggers, and even the odd malevolent entity bought by national adversaries). This is not only unfair to those who do adhere to a plausible set of ethics, but it also leaves large numbers of citizens, especially those in the younger generations, discouraged and even alienated from the idea of public service.
Of course, this can become so toxic that many decide to serve in order to correct the problem, as we saw in the recent mid-term elections. Perhaps some of them will step up to the plate within the Democratic Party in order to ban such efforts in the future. Such a move would result in positive returns as people realize, through aggressive reporting by the press, that only the Republicans continue to engage in deceptive practices in order to win. A useful Democratic tactic might be to ask if the Republicans’ policy proposals are really so discredited that they have to resort to deception in order to win public elections.
But I do remain discouraged at the lack of moral and political sense shown by those operatives who tried pulling the political levers. They really should have known better. “All’s fair in xyz” is never, ever true – in the long run.
