Last week, Alex Seitz-Wald of NBC News reported that Dr. Cornel West’s pathetically unserious independent presidential campaign has become more of an empty shell. “His former campaign manager says he knows nothing about ballot access”; the campaign has no money left; and the always-alert California Target Book’s Rob Pyers discovered that West’s expenditures report listed $4,500 for “graphics & design” but only $3,250 for “petitioning services.” Seitz-Wald also reported that, simultaneous with this collapse, Republican partisans are making increasing efforts to get West on the ballot in key states. In North Carolina, “a prominent Republican activist was spotted … outside a Trump rally gathering signatures for West, telling rallygoers it ‘helps take away votes from Joe Biden.’”
The ratfuck, of course, is a grand old tradition in the modern Republican Party. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) was the first Black person to run for president. In a famous meeting in the office of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, who was about to take over the incumbent’s re-election campaign, G. Gordon Liddy laid out an elaborate plan of election sabotage named after various minerals. Operation “COAL” was a plan to funnel money to Chisholm’s campaign. That operation, unlike the one about breaking into Democratic offices, never came off. Nor did a separate proposal to take out ads claiming to be raising money for a draft of Jesse Jackson. The plan, chief of staff Bob Haldeman explained to President Nixon, was to barrage Jackson’s office with thousands of “old $1 bills” from around the country. “After his ego is going, then you can’t turn him off,” Haldeman assured him.
The principle, simple and enduring: Front a Black person to divide the Democratic Party, the better to tank its eventual nominee’s chances in the November election.
Neither Chisholm nor Jackson had any idea about this until it came out during the Watergate investigations. Another figure who later came to prominence in American politics, however, was surely paying attention: Roger Stone. In 1972, he played a minor role as young ratfucker for the Nixon re-election campaign. In 2004, he brought out the old Nixon playbook again—financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of the Rev. Al Sharpton for the Democratic presidential nomination, as the late, legendary investigative journalist Wayne Barrett established beyond a shadow of a doubt that January in The Village Voice.
The association had first come to public attention two days earlier in The New York Times, where Stone and his associates had no trouble spinning it as a fun lark. He just liked the guy: “Frankly, there has not been a candidate with this much charisma since Ronald Reagan.”