Republicans Create Unit to Dig Up Any Damaging Data on Democrats

The Republican National Committee has established a new $1-million “opposition research” unit to collect potentially damaging information on Democratic candidates for use in the 1990 congressional election campaigns, a party official said Friday.

The unit, created early this year by Lee Atwater, the new committee chairman, is staffed by 40 researchers and investigators, and it is housed in a secure room at RNC headquarters here.

The operations of such a unit are likely to be politically sensitive at a time when Democrats have accused the GOP of using ethics issues to pursue personal vendettas against members of Congress. Revelations about the financial affairs of House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.) and Majority Whip Tony Coelho (D-Merced) led to their resignations in the last week.

The product of the unit and a similar, smaller one established by the Democrats can be expected to intensify the negative campaign tactics that played a crucial role in the 1988 campaign.

RNC Communications Director Mark Goodin, who oversees the effort, stressed that it would not seek out confidential personal information on Democrats.

“We’re not in the private investigator business. . . . This is not some sort of black bag unit or gumshoe work,” he said.

However, he said the unit did intend to compile a “comprehensive biographical profile” of every Democratic incumbent or challenger likely to participate in the 1990 races.

That would include copies of published and unpublished speeches and statements, given by the Democrat, articles or writings even dating back to their college years, voting records and a “biographical analysis” of his or her life, Goodin said.

An account of the new Republican strategy was first published in today’s editions of the Spartanburg, S.C., Herald-Journal and distributed Friday night by States News Service.

The creation of the new RNC opposition research unit marks the first time, apart from presidential campaigns, that the party has mounted an organized effort to dig up information on Democratic opponents, and it is intended to become a permanent fixture in Republican political strategy.

“I consider it frankly the single best resource we can put in the hands of Republican candidates at all levels,” Goodin said.

It was a Republican opposition research effort during the 1988 presidential campaign that identified convicted felon Willie Horton as a potential campaign issue to use against Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. Horton had murdered a man and raped his companion after being released under a Massachusetts prison furlough program.

Republican commercials that used the specter of the Horton case to attack Dukakis as soft on crime were regarded as among the most devastating blows to Dukakis’ presidential bid.

The Democratic Party has also established a new opposition research group in recent months to collect information on Republicans.

The communications director for the Democratic National Committee, Mike McCurry, noted that the five-member unit was much smaller than that of the Republicans. He said it was “devoted solely to learning something about our opponents’ positions and voting records” and did not collect personal intelligence.

McCurry said that he was aware of the Republican effort and that the Republicans were aware of his. “I don’t think any Democrat will be surprised to learn the Republican gumshoes are going to be digging through his garbage,” he said.

In the aftermath of the Wright and Coelho resignations, however, a number of Democrats and Republicans have called for an end to the kinds of increasingly aggressive negative attacks that have come to dominate political discourse.

On the Republican side, communications director Goodin said he expected Democrats to “bitch and moan” about the new strategy. “They’re going to accuse us of negative campaigning, but what our effort does is to uncover when a Democrat tries to obscure a very weak record.”

A new computer system established by the party would enable staffers to “store and retrieve millions of pieces of information” collected in the information sweep, Goodin said.

“This is a very sophisticated unit,” Goodin said, “an extremely sophisticated unit.”

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