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In S.C., campaign mud arrived before Santa
Renewed strife comes amid memories of brutal attacks on McCain in 2000
COLUMBIA, S.C. - On the bloody political battlefields of South Carolina, where memories of the brutal attacks on Senator John McCain in 2000 are still fresh, there are already signs of nasty and false attacks against other candidates as the presidential campaigns descend on this state.
Mudslinging in South Carolina began even before Christmas. Nearly 4,000 South Carolinians received bogus Christmas cards purporting to be from Mitt Romney that endorsed polygamy and talked about the “exceedingly fair and white” Virgin Mary.
All the cards were postmarked from South Carolina, but featured a photograph of the Boston Public Garden and said, falsely, that they were being sent by a Mormon temple in Boston.
Then there was PhoneyFred.org, a Web site that featured pictures of Fred D. Thompson in frilly clothes and said that he was “once a pro-choice skirt chaser.” That site was later taken down, after protests from the Thompson campaign.
At the moment, e-mail is flooding into South Carolina — after having appeared in Iowa and New Hampshire — alleging that Senator Barack Obama is Muslim, which he is not, and questioning his patriotism, based on a photograph in which he does not have his hand over his heart as the national anthem is being played.
South Carolina has had a long, and infamous, tradition of hardball political attacks, involving scurrilous allegations and whispering campaigns that, while false, are hard to disprove and politically damaging. With the Republican primary coming on Saturday and the Democratic primary seven days later, mud is in full swing.
Some of these attacks are from identifiable groups, like the ones on Mr. Romney from organizations critical of his position on abortion, which has gone from support to opposition. But others, often scurrilous and personal, float through the Internet and along telephone lines from anonymous sources and are impossible to trace.
On the Democratic side, the most spirited defensive effort is being waged by the Obama campaign after an increase in e-mail falsely stating that Mr. Obama attended a radical Islamic school as a child in Indonesia, and that his parents raised him as a Muslim so he could run for president and subvert the government.
In fact, Mr. Obama is a Christian and attended a nonreligious public school in Indonesia.
B. J. Welborn, a volunteer for Mr. Obama, said that she had recently noticed more comments about Mr. Obama’s supposed Muslim ties when making phone calls on his behalf.
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“We don’t know where it is coming from,” Ms. Welborn said. “We have a lot of fact sheets, and we direct people to the Obama Web site. But some people just don’t want to listen.”
The Obama campaign has asked its supporters to forward any e-mail messages they get along these lines to the campaign itself. In turn, the campaign will collect the e-mail addresses of the senders and forward the sender a “fact sheet” to rebut the false claims.
Democrats are learning their lessons from the Swift boat attacks against Senator John Kerry in 2004, when many in the party thought that Democrats were slow and tepid in responding to the attacks.
“We are less concerned about chasing ghosts on the Internet,” said Josh Earnest, a spokesman for the Obama campaign here, “than ensuring that the pernicious attacks don’t gain any credibility with the voting public.”
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