GOP mailer dirty tricks as usual

Thursday, Aug. 3, 2006 | 7:59 a.m.

The latest "just for fun" escapades of the Nevada Republican Party made me feel my age once more. Republicans send a mailer to Democrats most likely to vote in a primary and make it look like it comes from the states leading Democrat. Deja vu. Blast from the past.

It was 34 years ago that, as a young lawyer working in Washington, D.C., for a U.S. senator (John Tunney), I was dispatched to Southern California to try to track the money being spent by the soon-to-be notorious Donald Segretti, the so-called "head trickster" of the 1972 campaign of Richard Nixon. Segretti was a former military prosecutor and civil lawyer who ran a campaign of political sabotage against the Democrats during Nixons re-election campaign. Among Segrettis apprentices in that effort was a young Karl Rove.

My task, difficult as it turned out, was to try to gather information on the money Segretti was spending to distribute false campaign materials as part of the efforts of the aptly named "CREEP," the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The effort was difficult because the Senate Judiciary Committee (of which Tunney was a member) was controlled by a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans (led by James Eastland of Mississippi and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina) that refused to authorize subpoenas that would have allowed us to obtain the information backed with the possibility of contempt of Congress.

It was two years before the full measure of the dirty tricks of the 1972 Nixon campaign were exposed by the Watergate prosecutor. In 1974 Segretti served 4 1/2 months in prison on three misdemeanor charges for dispensing false campaign literature. He also was suspended from practicing law. After a two-year suspension, he eventually returned to the practice in Orange County, Calif., where, according to the Washington Post, he briefly ran for a Superior Court judgeship in 1995 "but withdrew after a week, saying the shadow of Watergate hung over the campaign."

"It was supposed to be a low-key campaign and a nonpartisan office," Segretti said. "But it wasnt treated that way."

Cut to Nevada in the present. Republicans sent campaign mailers to Democrats trying to trick them into voting for a slate of Republicans in ostensibly nonpartisan judicial races. The mailer came from something called the "Searchlight Group," and, as the Nevada Democratic Party warned earlier this week, "The piece was obviously designed to appear to come from Sen. Harry Reid, who has a Searchlight Leadership political action committee."

Reid was born in the Nevada mining town of Searchlight and has proudly proclaimed at every opportunity his roots in the small town where he grew up the son of a hard-rock miner.

Democrats, not surprisingly, screamed foul. The response from the Republicans bore an eerie resemblance to the excuses initially given by Segretti (before his conviction).

Clark County Republican Party Chairman John Hambrick told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the flier was "not an attempt to deceive or confuse." (Oh, really?) "We wanted to have some fun. It was tongue in cheek."

Las Vegas attorney Joe W. Brown is listed as the resident agent for the "Searchlight Group." Brown told the paper that he had nothing to do with the mailer, but otherwise shrugged it off. "I dont see any deception here," he said. "I dont think Democrats are that dumb."

Somehow I dont think that defense would have gotten Segretti off. And if the otherwise highly regarded Nevada lawyer Joe Brown sees nothing wrong with this kind of tactic, maybe the State Bar needs to take another look at ethics training for its members.

My father was a Republican, probably from the day he was born in 1915 until he died of a brain tumor at age 68. He was as rock-ribbed a conservative as there ever was, and he despaired that the first of his eight children could go so wrong as to vote for a Democrat, much less work for one in Washington. Had he lived, I have no doubt he would have proudly voted for both Bush 41 and Bush 43. But he despised people like Segretti for what they had done to his party.

Maybe the lessons of the Nixon campaign have in fact been lost on my fathers party. But as the avalanche of negative ads, and now dirty tricks, works to undermine the trust of voters, it seems fair to ask them the question made famous some 50 years ago in June 1954 by another lawyer, Joseph Welch: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"