Why Carson Has Already Gone Negative

People within the campaign of 7th District candidate Andre Carson would lead you to believe that they are totally confident about his winning the March 11 special election and are already looking beyond that election to the May primary where he will face a crowded field of candidates, including State Rep. Carolene Mays, State Rep. David Orentlicher and Dr. Woody Myers, all imminently more qualified candidates than Carson. The reality is that they have read the poll numbers and they don't like what they are seeing. The Carson name in the 7th congressional district has become ballot box poison.

Rep. Mays, to the chagrine of the Carson campaign and Democratic Party leaders, tipped everyone off to the Carson problem when she released the results of a poll her campaign commissioned in early January, which showed Carson the least popular among a number of politician's tested, including Gov. Mitch Daniels. That same poll showed Elrod, although with lower name recognition, with a much higher positive rating than Carson and in a dead heat race with him. While the Carson campaign tried to dismiss the poll results as unreliable, the pollster, Momentum Analysis, has a solid reputation in Democratic circles. The DCCC, having reviewed its own poll numbers, has come to the same conclusion. That's why it is dumping big bucks into the race early on to try to bolster Carson's sagging image in the district. At the same time, the Carson campaign understands it had to figure out a way to drive up Elrod's negatives.

No sooner than the race had begun before the Carson campaign started a whispering campaign about Elrod, touching on very personal matters. The Carson folks figure that, even if a guy doesn't have any skeletons in his closet, we'll just make up stuff and spread it around, hoping some of it will stick. Similarly, Elrod's Mr. Clean image was more than the ethically-challenged Carson folks could stand. They couldn't find anything in his public record on which to attack him so they decided to surrepticiously videotape him and create an ethics issue out of whole cloth, even if that meant engaging in unethical conduct themselves to acquire the videotape.

This activity is completely reminiscent of the late Rep. Julia Carson's last campaign in 2006. In the Democratic Party, Carson was opposed by Kris Kiser, the first openly gay congressional candidate in Indiana history. Although Kiser's campaign stood no chance of defeating her in the Democratic primary, Carson's folks became concerned that Kiser would succeed in eroding her support among a key group that made up the coalition which provided her very narrow victories in each of her 6 congressional races, Indianapolis' GLBT community. A large campaign contributor to Carson, who lived in Iowa, published a scathing and defamatory attack on Kiser's personal life on an Internet blog. Chucked full of inaccuracies and downright false information, the purpose of the story was to play on people's worst stereotypes of gay men, which was a bit ironic given the fact that the Carson supporter who published the material was a member of the GLBT community. The Carson campaign pitched the information to the mainstream media, but none of them took the bait, figuring the poor guy didn't have a chance, why beat him up further.

The Carson campaign repeated this sort of dirty campaigning in the fall election when it dug up a 15-year-old arrest record involving an alleged crime for which her Republican African-American opponent, Eric Dickerson, had never been convicted. The issue involved domestic abuse and was raised by Rep. Carson herself in an interview with the Star's editorial staff. Never mind that Carson herself had a well-known reputation for her own marital discord with her former husband, which sometimes became public and extremely ugly. This time the Carson folks hit pay dirt and the local media ran with the story just like they had hoped. The Star even endorsed the ineffective Carson. For good measure, the DCCC targeted a mailing raising the issue to the mostly-white areas of the 7th congressional district, playing on their worst stereotypes of black men. Carson won, but barely. Even though Dickerson spent little more than $50,000 in the race without any party backing, he still managed to pull nearly 47% of the vote, one of Carson's closest victories.

And so you have it. The Democrats nominate another Carson, this one even more incompetent and unqualified than his grandmother, whose 12-year congressional record proves she accomplished virtually nothing for all her years of service. The younger Carson has spent his young adult career working in government jobs his grandmother got for him with her political connections. The voters of the 7th District are repulsed by the choice the Democratic Party has served up to them. The Democrats know this, and they understand the only way Carson can beat Elrod in next month's election is to smear him as much as possible between now and election day. Their hope is that they can drive up Elrod's negatives enough to turn off voters so they won't bother to vote in the special election, which historically draw a small number of voters anyway, thereby paving the way for their underwhelming and unqualified candidate. Don't you just love politics?