Campaigns Use Trackers To Troll For A ‘Gotcha!’
http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-candidate-trackers-0704-20100703,0,650699.story
By DANIELA ALTIMARI, altimari@courant.com
July 6, 2010
That Yale student in a dark suit carrying a video camera and trailing Democratic candidate for governor Dan Malloy?
He’s not a journalist, Malloy staff member or supporter.
He’s a tracker, and he works for Democratic opponent Ned Lamont.
It’s his job to document everything Malloy says and does in public in hopes of capturing a misstatement, an empty boast, an inopportune turn of phrase or some other gotcha! moment to post to YouTube or feature in a TV ad.
“From the minute Dan gets out of the car to the minute he gets back into the car, he’s glued to him,” Malloy campaign manager Roy Occhiogrosso said. “He was literally waiting outside the men’s room for Dan the other day.”
The Malloy campaign has a tracker on Lamont, too.
“Ned usually walks up and says ‘hey’ to him,” said Lamont campaign manager Joe Abbey. “They’re not bad people, they’re just doing their jobs.”
Waiting For Blunders
Trackers have been a key component of many modern political campaigns since at least 2006, when former Virginia Sen. George Allen used the slur “macaca” to identify a young tracker for the opposition. The comment was caught on video and it helped sink Allen’s chances for re-election.
Several Connecticut campaigns, notably the contest between Lamont and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, experimented with trackers in 2006. But the 2010 election cycle, with its high-stakes races for governor and U.S. Senate — coupled with the advent of good, cheap cameras and a 24/7 news cycle that feeds on gotchas — marks the first time that trackers have been deployed on a broad scale in this state. Nearly all of the candidates running for major office are employing them this year.
“Campaigns changed forever whenever the cellphone manufacturers began putting cameras on their products,” said Ed Patru, a spokesman for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon. “We assume everything is always being captured and, in fact, most campaigns operate under that assumption.”
Yet politicians continue to get tripped up in the presence of a camera. Last week, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele found himself a target when he told an audience at a private fundraiser in Noank that the war in Afghanistan was “a war of Obama’s choosing.” He also suggested that the current strategy is not winnable, a view that most members of his own party do not support.
It was all caught on video by the state Democratic Party’s tracker, who was watching from a part of the restaurant that remained open to the public.
Hoping to enlist a vast army with cellphones and Flip cameras to document more such moments, the Democratic National Committee has put out a call for citizen trackers. Dubbed the Accountability Project, this new initiative allows anyone to upload video from the campaign trail; the more embarrassing, the better. ( Republicans only, of course.)
“People need to be held accountable for what they’re saying,” said Shauna Daly, the DNC’s director of research. “There are certain moments of truth when something crystallizes and a veneer breaks down.”
Running for office can be tedious work, and blunders happen. Attorney General and Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate Richard Blumenthal said he misspoke when he incorrectly stated that he served in Vietnam. Blumenthal’s comments were caught on video, although not by a tracker.
Fergus Cullen, the former chairman of the Republican Party in New Hampshire who now leads the Yankee Institute for Public Policy in Hartford, said he worries that the rise of trackers will lead to overly cautious candidates who hew to talking points and avoid saying anything unscripted.
“It has the negative effect of producing more robotic candidates who can never give you a candid response because they’re always afraid of saying the wrong things,” Cullen said. “You get these bland, anodyne comments from candidates who don’t feel like they can have an honest conversation with voters, and I think that’s unfortunate.”
The McMahon campaign’s trackers assigned to Blumenthal hope to catch the candidate in an “unguarded moment,” Patru said. “When and if he ever does, we’d like to capture it. Our trackers get a lollipop if they ever manage to record Blumenthal taking a stand on a policy issue. ”
The Blumenthal campaign does not have a tracker following McMahon, but the state Democratic Party does. “Trackers are part of campaigns now,” said Kate Hansen, a spokeswoman for state Democrats. “New technologies mean more information can be collected and shared faster than ever – you hope with an eye toward old-fashioned values of honesty and respect, both in the gathering and sharing of that information.”
In The Shadows
Dan Malloy held a press conference on education last week at the Legislative Office Building. Seated before him were the members of the Capitol press corps, a dozen or so advocates, and a handful of handlers and staff members. Standing squarely in the front row, next to a video camera on a tripod, was Lamont tracker Steven Winter.
At one point, Malloy couldn’t see the reporter asking him a question because Winter was blocking his line of sight. “I’m stepping over here because I’m trying to see around you,” he said.
There’s nothing particularly cloak-and-dagger about the way the trackers go about their jobs: Everyone on the campaign trail knows who they are and why they are there.
Yet most prefer to operate in the shadows. The Malloy, Lamont, McMahon and state Democratic Party all rebuffed requests to interview their trackers, who are generally junior staff members. The job is fairly tedious: How many times can you hear the same stump speech?
The DNC advises its citizen trackers that they are there to “document not to disturb or disrupt the event.” Private fundraisers and the like are supposed to be off-limits, although Steele’s controversial remarks on Afghanistan at the Noank fundraiser were apparently considered fair game.
Cullen said he tried to hammer out ground rules for trackers when he was GOP chairman in New Hampshire. One candidate sent a tracker to an event at which the 70-year-old mother of the opposing candidate was being honored. “I thought that was going into the area of harassment,” Cullen said. “What’s next? Are you going to start following a candidate’s children around?”
Still, the campaigns say the work is important.
“It’s about accountability,” said Joe Abbey, Lamont’s campaign manager. “It’s good for our campaign to know what our opponents are saying and it’s good for the public at large. … There’s more sunlight and more accountability, which is never a bad thing.”
Added Ashley Maagero, campaign manager for Republican gubernatorial candidate R. Nelson “Oz” Griebel, “We welcome the opportunity to have a tracker follow us around. … If you’re transparent and accessible, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Copyright © 2010, The Hartford Courant
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