The First Rule of Politics: Know Your Candidate Better Than Your Opponent Does
Repeated vetting failures aren’t bad luck. They’re what happens when politicians and political organizations confuse candidate love for basic competence.
by Brett Di Resta (with contributions by Cliff Schecter)
The event-horizon-like implosion of Graham Platner in Maine calls into question everything I thought I knew about Democratic strategists and research.
As many must know by now, Daniel Moraff of the political consulting firm The Fight Agency “discovered” Graham Platner and immediately fell in love. And not just a quotidian kind of love. The love of fairy tales and Trump family pre-nups. Moraff had Platner pegged as our next President before he even had the nomination to run as the Democratic Senate candidate from Maine.
Which perhaps blinded him to the obvious.
Rather than taking their time and do it right, the consultants paid a research firm $6,250 and gave them just three days to vet Platner’s background. Additionally, Moraff (who has his own, personal vetting issues) copped in an interview to immediately tossing aside all of the research findings he had rushed to receive for pennies on the dollar.
Trust me when I tell you that the initial vet of someone planning to run for the U.S. Senate should take several weeks, and cost at least twice as much as what Moraff paid. Watching him brag about his incompetent vetting strategy is like seeing someone buy gas station sushi—then boast about getting it on the cheap while ambling toward an outhouse.
There is an old adage that Washington, D.C. is just Hollywood for ugly people. Comedian Jay Leno, former host of The Tonight Show, was fond of repeating that one to the oft-uproarious laughter of his late-show audience.
And if it’s true for Democratic consultants—political researchers are most certainly dead last on the call sheet. But when they need us, they need us. That’s why after 30 years as an opposition researcher, I’m at peace with our place in the campaign firmament. I take comfort in the fact that the true political ball-knowers—the professionals who take their jobs seriously and want to win their campaigns—greatly value what we do.
Or at least, they used to. Moraff—obviously—but also too many among his ilk seem to neither understand nor value the contribution and/or necessity of quality opposition research.
In fact, it is where too many campaigns—Democratic ones we care about—truly get it wrong these days.
The problem was not simply that vulnerabilities existed—it was that no one seemed to understand what professional vetting was actually supposed to accomplish. So let me tell you exactly where these campaigns failed, why they keep making the same mistakes over-and-over again, and how competent campaigns handle these situations before they become front-page news.
What should they have done? Let’s start with Platner and go through the list. Yes, sadly, there’s a list of Democratic debacles this campaign cycle that are threatening the kind of wave election we should have—by every metric available.
Ok, let’s get started.
Cliff’s Note:
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