MEDISCARE TACTICS

A lowdown election trick came back and bit Chiles on the anniversary of his 63,000-vote win over Jeb Bush in the closest governor’s race in Florida history. Thanks to subpoena threats from Republican state senator Charlie Crist, we now know the following: National Telecommunications Systems, Inc. ( NTS), a phone-bank company, made at least 70,000 (and as many as 684,000) calls to senior citizens in the last three days of the November 1994 campaign. The cold-callers passed themselves off as members of two groups: the Florida Association of Senior Citizens (which is run by a Republican) and Citizens for Tax Fairness (which does not exist). They told voters that (a) Bush’s running mate favored eliminating Social Security, and (b) Jeb Bush was a tax cheat. Neither was, strictly speaking, true.

The Chiles campaign denied all knowledge of the scheme until Crist’s subpoena loomed. Then campaign manager Jim Krog stepped up to take the fall. But not really take the fall. As Chiles spokesman Ron Sachs says, “Jim Krog acknowledged he made a bad decision. He is one of the great political strategists in the state.” (No argument there.) “And frankly, he’s the Republicans” worst nightmare.” In other words, he’s staying.

So is Scott Falmlen, who served for five years as vice president of the offending phone-bank company before going into Florida politics in 1990. He has been rewarded for his efforts on the Chiles campaign with the executive directorship of the Florida Democratic party. Says Sachs: “He’ll continue to serve as executive director.” Even with the two most liberal newspapers in the state — the Gainesville Sun and the St. Petersburg Times — raining abuse on Chiles, the governor grudgingly apologized only on November 14. The message of the non-firings and semi-apology is that this kind of campaigning is okay with at least one of the Democratic party’s arbiters of what is in-bounds and what out.

Nor are Republicans above such wiles: Virginia’s Joint Republican Caucus has owned up to mailing 6,000 postcards urging Democrats to vote for an independent assembly candidate, Donal Day, in order to draw votes away from Democrat Emily Couric (Katie’s sister), who won anyway. The cards were mailed out under the na me of a group called “Dems 4 Day” (a dead give-away: Only Republican activists refer to Democrats as “Dems”). In neither the Florida nor the Virginia case were laws violated. Florida has no sponsor-identification law. Virginia has one but it wasn’t broken: Republicans actually went to the trouble of founding Dems 4 Day — it’s a real organization.

Similarities between the Florida scare calls and the Medicare tactics used by Democrats this fall only heighten Republican fears that a new campaign style is emerging nationally. In Kentucky, a wacky campaign-finance reform that strangles candidates while allowing untrammeled “independent” expenditures may have interacted with scare tactics in a way that led to illegalities. The husband of a staffer for Republican senator Mitch McConnell received two calls within two minutes from near4dentical numbers (606 491-9533 and 606 491-9522). The first caller identified himself as an AFL-CIO operative. The second claimed to work in the office of Republican candidate Larry Forgy and said, “We would like you to get out and vote for our candidate. We think that he’s the biggest thief ever.” The state’s Registry of Election Finance is investigating.

Such attacks constitute the worst kind of dirty campaigning. Yet Chiles spokesman Sachs is half right when he says that they are part of the ordinary give-and-take of politics. Republicans (and the IVall Street Journal editorial page) have been too quick to use the fraudulent conduct in Florida to besmirch all Democratic rhetoric designed to scare the bejabers out of voters over social-service cuts. True, some of these messages bordered on the moronic: Kentucky voters were warned that Republicans, in their zeal for privatization, wanted to “sell” the state’s lakes, as if someone were going to load them onto cargo planes and ship them to Japan. Virginia Republican activists piecing together Democratic phone appeals say that one of the Medicaid calls contained the line, “Republicans want to take away your home … “It’s a bit pathetic, as Newt Gingrich, unsurprisingly, has remarked.

But it’s not a threat to civilization as we know it. No one should confuse Chiles’s sleazy tactics with his message — which may be sleazy, too, but is up to voters to parse. It’s not illegitimate to “scare” senior citizens about benefits, any more than it’soff4imits to scare city-dwellers about crime. Certain Republicans seem inclined to police such Democratic “distortions” as describing the slowing of Medicare increases as “cuts.” In fact, this is not unlike the language Republicans used to rail against tax “increases” through bracket-creep in the late 70s. The Democrats may be taking advantage of a tilted rhetorical playing field on Medicare and Social Security, but it’s up to the Republicans to even it out.

Republicans at the National Republican Senatorial Committee are making sure a Florida-style phone scheme doesn’t happen again. The committee’s executive director, John Heubusch, favors an investigation of several state races and has put Democrats on notice that selected seniors” homes in Oregon will be equipped with call-tracing machinery during the mailin special elections to fill Bob Packwood’s open Senate seat. That’s good. Such measures address the really serious issues that have arisen out of Florida “94 and the recent elections. They should be sufficient to prevent a repeat of the con job in Florida last year, which gave Chiles the governorship but cost him the thing he always so self-righteously professed to care about most.

by Christopher Caldwell