Chris Lehane

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Chris Lehane (born 1968) is an American political consultant on opposition research for the Democratic National Committee and various other organizations. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was the political director of the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign in Maine, and was later brought into the White House as part of a "rapid-response" team employed to influence on the increasing number of investigations of the Clinton administsration.^[1]

[edit] Political work

In 1995 Lehane authored a 332-page "report" on media "conspiracy" against the Clinton, of which only 2 and 1/2 pages are written text; the remainder is newspaper and internet clippings. This report was the origin of the phrase "vast right wing conspiracy" that is often attributed to Hillary Clinton. Because of Lehane's scrutiny of the right-wing media "food chain," he is often credited with being a proponent of its methods within the Democratic party.^[2]

Lehane is also credited with conducting "intramural" opposition research against fellow Democrats during primaries; working for the failed Wesley Clark bid for the 2004 nomination, he mounted considerable efforts to derail the Howard Dean bid, portraying him as hypocritical, dishonest, and inconsistent. Lehane also suppled opposition research for the failed Al Gore(2000) and John Kerry (2004) campaigns for the presidency.^[3] Kerry dismissed Lehane during September of 2003 his campaign, not wishing to be associated with his tactics.^[4]

Though a Democrat, Lehane is often included in discussions of "politics of personal destruction" methodologies employed by Republican opposition researchers, including feeding information to selected media outlets, then threatening to feed it to competitors if the selectees do not run the "release" in a timely manner.^[5] Lehane often works as a paid television commentator, criticized by some media critics for being a "plant" who passes for an impartial observer, while in fact advancing a "narrative" for certain candidates. During the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike, Lehane and his partner Mark Fabiani were retained by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to guide its public relations. ^[6]

[edit] References

[edit] Quotes

"[Y]ou have to plant a lot of seeds in the spring and the summer so you can capitalize on it. If you have a story that's going to hit in the middle of September, middle of October, what you really want to do is build several things athat come off of the story so that it's not just a one-day hit. If the story runs on the front page of a major paper, you also want to set it up so that it hits some of the television morning shows, and from there you want to have surrogates out the nexst day, so that you get a second hit. On the third day, ideally, you have some additional information you've been holding back that you can feed into it, another round of stories. On the fourth or fifth day you try to hold your candidate back from saying anything, so that eventually, when he does say something about the issue, you get another round of stories. If you do it all effectively, you can basically wipe out a guy's entire week. He'll spend the entire week responding to a story that showed up on a Monday."

—Chris Lehane, quoted in Atlantic Monthly, June 2004