160: Character Assassination
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What's it mean to do politics in this country these days? Consider the story of a man named Jack Robinson. One day this March, he held a press conference to announce that he was going to start gathering signatures to get on the ballot to run for Senate in Massachusetts against Teddy Kennedy. He had never run for political office before. And then literally within 24 hours of at least putting our name forward, we were hit with a withering attack literally within the first day of even announcing the campaign. I was at Republican State Committee headquarters having interviews with the press, sitting down with one of the reporters, the reporter asked me after I said, you know, why I'm running. By the way, have you ever been arrested for drunk driving? And I said, yes, no one would know about that because we sealed the case file since I had been found not guilty and I passed the breathalyzer test. So I was very forthright and then gave the details. But that was the beginning of it. And then it just didn't stop. Then have you ever had a restraining order ever taken against you? And then this and then that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so. The plan was to announce the campaign and perhaps this was political nivotam, my part, maybe get a week or so of a general publicity about, you know, what we stand for, who are we? A little did I know that within a day of announcing the campaign, no one would care about any of that stuff, who I am or what I stand for, but what's in my past. And so Jack Robinson decided to take action. He issued a long public statement that is simply one of the most remarkable documents of current political life in this country. He called it the Robinson Report and posted it on the internet for anybody to read. It outlines, in matter effect prose and a disturbing level of detail, everything he thinks he's ever done wrong, an unpaid speeding ticket from the 1980s, an illegal martial arts implement that a police officer found in his pocket when he was a graduate student, his failure to pass the bar exam three times, a plagiarism case against him, a restraining order that a woman put against him, a variety of business lawsuits. And making this information public early in the campaign, he wrote, "I hope to have offered my fellow citizens a full and fair description of my personal background in a manner which allows them to decide whether I am capable of representing them in a position of public trust, confidence, and honor." "I've been told I've been the first person in American political history to drop a dime on himself, but I think the citizens will have to decide over the foreseeable future as to how much they want to know about people. I've done nothing wrong, I've committed no crimes, I've gotten no record. At the end of the day, people don't care about my drunk driving arrest 15 years ago any more than they care about Chapa Quiddick 30 years ago." Jack Robinson mentioned Chapa Quiddick and what he called Ted Kennedy's foibles four times in the hour that I spent with him. Each time, declaring they should not be part of any campaign, sort of nasty. But what exactly is a man to do? This is the state of politics in America. And as we head into another season of presidential campaigning, Al Gore is already pounding on George Bush, and George Bush made clear in the primaries that when threatened, he'll get his nasty a see has to. Next few months of our political lives, they're going to be ugly, just ugly.
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