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Health & Fitness

Welcome to the War of 2012.

In any war, when an army gets a new and powerful weapon, it won't hesitate to use it. Like the atomic bomb. This year's new weapon is the super PAC.

 

Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian military theorist, had it backward when he wrote, “War is politics by other means.” He should have said: “Politics is war by other means.”

This year’s presidential campaign will be a war of annihilation. Look at what happened to Newt Gingrich in Iowa. He got totally annihilated by the most fearsome weapon of war in the history of American politics: the super PAC.

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In any war, when an army gets a new and powerful weapon, it won’t hesitate to use it. Like the atomic bomb. This year’s new weapon is the super PAC. Super PACs can collect contributions in unlimited amounts and spend them any way they want — as long as their activities are uncoordinated with any campaign.

Is that legal? It is now, because the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the government cannot limit independent spending to influence elections.

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Enter Restore Our Future, a super PAC run by former Mitt Romney operatives. Restore Our Future spent twice as much money in Iowa as the Romney campaign did — almost all of it on anti-Gingrich ads. Romney could and did disassociate himself from the attacks. The ads were not run by his campaign.

That’s why super PACS are so powerful. There’s no blowback. They damage the target without doing collateral damage to the candidate they favor. While Gingrich’s support collapsed in Iowa, Romney’s support remained steady. That’s right steady. Romney’s percentage numbers barely changed since December but Gingrich was destroyed.

Nearly half of all the ads in Iowa were anti-Gingrich. They attacked the former speaker for, among other things, his position on illegal immigration, his ethics violations, and his past views on climate change and health care.

Gingrich left these many charges unanswered, for two reasons. One, they were mostly true. Two, he had no money to defend himself.

But they do work. Gingrich would have won the caucuses if they had been held in early December. By early January, however, after weeks of relentless attacks over the airwaves, Gingrich was doomed.

Gingrich’s Iowa campaign will live forever as a case study in what happens if you are faced with a negative campaign and don’t fight back. It’s the same tactic used to obliterate Dukakis back in 1988. The racially incendiary Willie Horton ads were run by an independent spending committee that year, not by the George H.W. Bush campaign. It’s the same tactic was used to demolish Sen. John Kerry’s war hero credentials in 2004, when he was attacked by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — also an independent spending committee.

The Iowa caucuses were only the first battle of the War of 2012. We can expect more of this ugliness as the war unfolds in battles all across the country.

In 1988, the Willie Horton ads against Dukakis were seen as an aberration, but in 2012 total war is now the norm.

The country’s only hope? That this war, like every war in U.S. history, will ignite an anti-war movement.

Actually there is one now brewing. The big money came into this war because of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens’ United” ruling in 2010. The ruling stated that this form of warfare was Constitutionally legal because it deemed that corporations are people and thus have the same right to free speech as you or I.

The new movement, Move to Amend will seek a Constitutional amendment that will declare that corporations do not have the right to personhood. You can find out more about this movement by going to http://movetoamend.org/

If this moves you, then you can then you can: (1) sign the petition on the web site and/or (2) find out more at a meeting on Thursday, January 12, 2012, 7:30 PM at the First Universalist Society of Salem, 211 Bridge Street, Salem, MA. Speaker John Hill, from the Greater Boston Move to Amend, will deliver a speech entitled Democracy Betrayed: The Citizens United Supreme Court Decision and How Corporations Rule America.

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