Obama Says He Won’t Be Swiftboated

It’s a shame that “swiftboating” has become a verb. Obama’s campaign may already feel it’s waited too long to respond to some of the attacks. But now they’re getting ready for people like David Bossie.

Operatives such as David Bossie, whose Citizens United group made the Willie Horton ad that helped sink Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential bid, are sharpening knives as expectations mount that Obama will be their target in the fall. Bossie says he is assembling material for TV spots about Obama’s ties with (Bill) Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War.

Dave “Doctor” Gonzo has the dossier on Bossie at American Politics Journal:

• As executive director of Citizens United chairman Floyd Brown’s “Presidential Victory Committee,” he used taped conversations allegedly between then-Governor Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers as part of an advertising and “800” number scheme to smear Clinton. The tapes have since been discredited because they were edited and doctored. A direct mailing from Citizens United using this material was made to look as if it were an “official” mailing from Bush campaign — and the Bush people alerted the FEC to the mailings in an effort to stop them!
• David Corn reports in the May 6, 1998 issue of Salon that “at one point, Bossie got into a fistfight in Arkansas with a private detective who claimed Bossie had welshed on a $10,000 payment for anti-Clinton material.”
• That same year, Bossie harassed the family of a suicide victim. “An anonymous and untraceable letter” was faxed to some 30 news organizations “claiming Clinton had had an affair with a former law student who committed suicide 15 years ago,” an “emotionally distraught young woman, seven-months pregnant” named Susan Coleman. Only after the fact of the fax campaign did Bossie attempt to contact the family for “confirmation,” and did so in a repetitive and unrelenting manner suggestive more of harrassment than fact-checking. Bossie, with help from former Washington DC police officer James Murphy, went so far as to follow Susan’s mother to a hospital in Augusta, Georgia, where her husband was seriously ill and recovering from a stroke. They “burst into the sick man’s room and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter’s suicide.” (Source: CBS News, July 13, 1992, quoted at The Allodium web site)

Maybe it’s Bossie who should be “swiftboated”.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.