By now, you may have read the news about Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign distributing mass letters to the editor for supporters to submit to papers around Minnesota. (MPR, MNPublius, AP). The letters were criticizing Coleman opponent Al Franken, the leading Democrat. While encouraging supporters to write letters to the editor is common practice, the concept of having several people sign the same letter in different areas is generally considered to be crossing a line.
Every once in a while you hear about a campaign getting caught in this practice and it always proves to be not worth the perceived benefits. Though those letters may have kicked up a tizzy in small towns around the state for 24 hours or so, they now have the effect of making Coleman look like he runs a coordinated smear campaign run from the top down. People like their candidates to have popular, grassroots support — be they conservative or liberal.
The incident reminded me of the night of Paul Wellstone’s memorial service in 2002. I was staying up late to watch the service before my early, early morning at the the editor’s desk of the Hibbing Daily Tribune (We were an afternoon paper then, so I was laying out my front page at 5 a.m.). When I logged into the newspaper e-mail right before 5 I had hundreds of mass produced, identical e-mails from people “outraged” over the partisan tone of the Wellstone memorial. We later learned that a state GOP site had a function in place where people could simply submit their name and town and a letter would be sent to all state newspapers. While this shady tactic was later disavowed by both parties, Coleman never really paid a price for this “made to order” outrage. (Remember, these kinds of website functions take time to code and design. It HAD to have been at least in progress at the time the memorial started.) Every Minnesota newspaper editor encountered several hundred identical letters that day, many of which were published … again primarily in small town papers.
Six years later, here we are again. Coleman is feeling the heat of worsening poll numbers. His campaign tries to figure out ways to drive up the negatives of a surging opponent. And again, his campaign almost gets away with a shady tactic. Almost. Now newspapers will be casting a wary eye on pro-Coleman or anti-Franken letters, which is not what Coleman’s people wanted at all. Believe me, candidates, this strategy is bad news any way you slice it. Every supporter should be signing unique letters coming from their unique point of view.
Speak Your Mind