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Thursday, August 4, 2011

Oppo Has Changed

As Ben Smith writes at Politico, technology has changed opposition research:

“It used to be that 90 percent of it was in the dark-arts category, slipping folders to reporters,” said Jeffrey Berkowitz, former RNC research director. “Now it’s almost the opposite, where 90 percent of it is being pushed out on a daily basis by campaigns.”

The changed media cycle has worked that change in oppo, as it’s known. The old mainstream media gatekeepers meant that there was a buyer’s market for information: The oppo was plentiful, the outlets scarce. Now, the outlets are infinite, and campaigns have the luxury of choosing whether a tidbit is best blasted to the press list, sent to a mainstream media reporter or sent, perhaps, to a scribe from a conservative outlet, from RedState to The Daily Caller, with a posture that would make it harder to dismiss as mere lamestream sniping at a good conservative.

There may also, Berkowitz suggested, be a new Republican appetite for a thorough vetting of their own.

“After the debacles they witnessed last cycle in states like Delaware and Colorado and Alaska, where candidates were not sufficiently vetted before they were nominated, I would expect opposition research to play a stronger role in campaign efforts to feed Republican voters’ desire to trust but verify this cycle,” he said.

For example, see Mark Murray at MSNBC.com:
In advance of the president's fundraisers in Chicago tonight, the Romney camp has produced a Web video noting how unemployment is up in Chicago and home prices are down there since Obama took office. "Obama isn't working," the Web video concludes.

But a rival campaign sends over opposition research that plays the Bain Capital card: The private equity firm that Romney once headed bought a Chicago-area-based medical diagnostics company -- renamed Dade International, which later became Dade Behring -- that ended up firing and relocating workers.