GOP Campaign "Trackers" Go Undercover

By Sniffles

Remember George Allen's "Macaca moment"? It seems like a hundred years ago, but in 2006 the then-Republican-Senator from Virginia spotted an Indian-American tracker in the crowd at a campaign event, singled him out with a race-based slur and "welcomed" the young man (a born-and-bred Virginian) to America.

George Allen lost his Senate race that year to Democrat Jim Webb.

What the "Macaca" kid, S.R. Sidarth, was up to is something that's still done: following a candidate on the trail and videotaping everything he/she says. "Trackers" openly work for opposing campaigns and their presence is pretty much routine and accepted. In 2014, in fact, we cats met Senator Mark Warner's tracker, who shadowed Chinless Ed Gillespie so often that he got to know him. Chinless Ed, he said, was "a nice guy."

But that was then. What's new now, at least to us cats, is that videographers are posing as campaign volunteers for the candidate they're targeting and taking video in secret. This is what happened to Tedra Cobb, the Democratic nominee for Congress in New York's 21st district, who's running against Republican incumbent and Paul Ryan acolyte Elise Stefanik. Pretending to be a supporter, a 17-year-old kid attended a "Teens for Tedra" meeting and recorded Cobb saying that she couldn't come out in favor of an assault weapons ban because it would kill her chances of winning.

The NRCC paid the kid — a Stefanik intern — a thousand bucks for his deception.

We don't know how much of an impact Cobb's statement will have on the race. Our guess is that the true gun nuts up in the Adirondacks weren't going to vote for her anyway. But it'll be interesting to see if Stefanik will be able to skate by with her non-denial denials — particularly to newspapers like the Glens Falls Post-Star, which will only accept on-the-record statements directly from candidates and not from their spinners. That would be the same Post-Star that finally got Stefanik to pledge that she wouldn't lie to them, either. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.