Morton Brilliant

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Morton Brilliant is a political campaign manager in the United States. He attended Brandeis University and George Washington School of Law.

1 Career
- 1.1 Georgia controversy
2 Trivia
3 Sources and notes

[edit] Career

Brilliant was the initial campaign manager for Democrat Cathy Cox's 2006 gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. He was campaign spokesman for Democrat Christine Gregoire in the Washington state gubernatorial race, a very close race in which Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi after two recounts. He was also deputy campaign manager for Jim Hodges' successful South Carolina governor's race in 1998, and worked as Hodges' Deputy Chief of Staff. Before that, he was a political director for the South Carolina Democratic Party.^[1]

[edit] Georgia controversy

On April 26, 2006, Brilliant resigned as campaign manager for Secretary of State Cathy Cox amid allegations that he altered Wikipedia's online biography of her Democratic opponent to add a mention of his son's arrest in a fatal drunk driving accident. Those edits occurred on November 16, 2005 and further on November 22, 2005. ^[2] Cox said an internal investigation confirmed that the posting about her opponent, Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, on Wikipedia came from within her gubernatorial campaign. The Taylor campaign had further provided documents showing that the online server that revised Taylor's profile had also added negative information to Wikipedia biographies of Republican opponents of other Brilliant clients in Washington state and South Carolina governor campaigns (Dino Rossi and Mark Sanford). ^[3]^[4] ^[5]

[edit] Trivia

Brilliant often includes the following postscript on introductory e-mail messages:

"Since the questions always come up, here are the answers in advance: yes, the last name really is Brilliant; no, it wasn’t changed; yes, my parents are normal, reasonable, ordinary people from South Carolina; and yes, if you lose the "t" in the first name, I am truly Moron Brilliant." ^[6]