Politics 101-Murray Chotiner

You are unlikely to know about Murray Chotiner.  He is and was probably the greatest political strategist in the last 50 years.  I knew Murray because I worked on Richard Nixon's losing California Gubernatorial campaign in 1962.  Murray was the campaign manager. He won two subsequent presidential campaigns for Nixon.

I ran two local political campaigns in the following years (winning both) and gave a talk to a national Republican campaign conference on my various techniques, some learned from Murray Chotiner.

The relevance today is two recent campaigns: Gov. Bob McDonnell's overwhelming unexpected win in November in Virginia and Sen. Scott Brown's astounding, historic, win in Massachusetts.

Murray said that you must defeat your opponent in the opposite party in the primary... you must never use attack material in a general election, the public hates the attacker.

The reason you probably don't know this rule is that in many general elections, in close races, both sides are slinging mud. 

However, as widely reported, and as heard by those of us who follow these things closely, in both the McDonnell race and the Brown race, the Democrat spent the entire general election period attacking and slinging mud, while neither Republican paid any attention to the attacks.

Murray was right. The public hates dirty campaigns and will vote against an obvious one-sided attacker.

PS. By the way, if Meg Whitman, who will be the Republican candidate in the California General election, had Murray on her team, we would be hearing the rumor about her future Democratic opponent, Jerry Brown, right now. We would hear that he is an old pot head, so stoned that he isn't out campaigning now.  This of course is not true, Brown is a brilliant and honest campaigner but the rumor has to run now, if ever, to be effective, not after he wins the Democratic primary.