I hate to steer anyone away from the national campaigns, but this is just too good of an example of how NOT to conduct a political smear campaign that I couldn't resist. It does have sort of a familiar aroma.
Wichita Eagle October 23, 2020: Secret recording: O’Donnell, Capps, Clendenin plot how to get away with Whipple smearhttps://amp.kansas.com/news/secret recording released Friday shows Republican officials sought to frame the county’s Republican chairman for falsified ad smearing mayoral candidateExcerpts BelowA secret recording released Friday shows that three Republican officials sought to frame the county’s Republican chairman for a falsified ad they put together smearing then-mayoral candidate Brandon Whipple.
State Rep. Michael Capps said the anti-Whipple video was justifiable to derail Whipple’s candidacy, because he’s a “liberal Democrat.”
O’Donnell, Capps and Wichita City Council member James Clendenin were behind the plot. And when their involvement was coming to light, they decided to lie and frame members of their own party, the recording reveals.
Initially, they thought to implicate both county GOP Chairman Dalton Glasscock and County Clerk Kelly Arnold, a former chairman of the state Republican Party. They ultimately decided not to try to implicate Arnold because he was more capable of fighting back and they felt it was a war they couldn’t win.
In the secret recording — about 50 minutes long — O’Donnell, Clendenin and Capps craft a calculated narrative meant to mislead the public and cover their tracks while saving their political careers.
The fake ad, launched on Facebook and YouTube about two weeks before the November mayoral election, used paid actresses posing as legislative interns to falsely accuse Whipple of sexual harassment when he was a state representative.
One of those actresses told The Eagle she was paid $50 to read the script and told it would be used in a public-service message denouncing violence against women.
The script lifted accusations from a Kansas City Star/Wichita Eagle story about alleged Statehouse harassment by Republican senators and those accusations didn’t involve Whipple.
O’Donnell, who has fought off several scandals in his political career as a City Council member, state senator and county commissioner, offered a nugget of advice to the others.
“Like I’ve always learned in politics, it’s always avoid the truth at all expense, right? And just go on the attack.” O’Donnell said.
The four participants in the meeting brainstormed talking points for the Whitmer show and discussed how they could manufacture their narrative around a meeting with Glasscock that never happened.
At one juncture, Capps pointed out that Glasscock had been traveling out of town and asked O’Donnell to sift through his text messages and find a day when Glasscock was actually in Wichita, to add plausibility to Capps’ claim that he’d met with him.
They also settled on what their story would be if Capps were asked where the purported meeting occurred.