Ghostwritten Letters Common Campaign Tactic

Margriet Oostveen, a journalist who writes a weekly column called “Message from Washington” in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad has elevated her profile thanks to her work as a ghostwriter.

That’s because she was writing letters to the editor for the John McCain campaign for president.

The letters would be given to Republican supporters, who are asked to sign and send the letters to their local newspapers, hoping to have them printed.

It’s an all-too-common method of garnering free support and making it look as if the “common man” is behind a particular candidate. Republicans and Democrats are guilty of enlisting this help, but the buzz generated by Oostveen’s work is especially loud because, in her letters, she pretended to have a son deployed to Iraq. She has worked for both Sens. Barack Obama and McCain during the campaign. In an online column at Salon.com, she details her ghostwriting work for the McCain campaign office in Arlington, Va.

Oostveen explains how she was given talking points for the letters – political ideals that should be included, like how Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s son is serving in Iraq. She repeatedly worries that others will laugh at what she has written, or that she will be asked to leave.

Instead, campaign staffer Phil Tuchman sees her first offering, says “I like it” and encourages her to write more letters. He tells her the letters will be sent to campaign offices in battleground states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Virginia. “There we’ll place them in local newspapers,” he tells her.

“Place them? I may be wrong, but I thought that in the USA only a newspaper’s editors decided that,” Oostveen wrote in her column.

“We will show your letters to supporters in those states,” Tuchman told her. “If they say: ‘Yeah, he/she is right!’ then we ask them to sign your letter. And them we send that letter to the local newspaper. That’s how we send dozens of letters at once.”

Oostveen’s article explained that “No newspaper can refuse a steam of articulate expressions of support,” and then quotes Tuchman saying, “This way, we always get into some letters column.”

Many online readers responded with revulsion.

“I might find the very best summation of my argument on an issue, but I’d never want to pass it off as my own unless I wrote it myself,” a person with the screen name “asage” wrote at Salon.com.

Exactly.

It feels like cheating, because it is. Political campaigns have done this for years, but it’s still smarmy.

Later, asage writes: “Holy lord, is this normal? Did I just lose the last part of the paper I considered to be genuine?”

Yes and no.

The practice is normal, common even, and newspaper editors and reporters know it. Political parties enlist people to write letters for their candidates, then try to get others to sign off on them and send them to their local newspaper.

That’s why we have a verification policy on letters. We call every writer and ask them if they wrote the material they submitted. Their letter is supposed to be original material, penned by them.
Can they choose to lie? Sure. But we ask the question and hope they will be truthful.

And we are skeptical of letters that warrant it – similar prose on similar letterhead is a red flag every time. We limit people to one letter per month. We know our neighbors – how they talk and how they write. It is our job to defend this page so the opinions of its readers are truly reflected.

We cannot guarantee that a ghostwritten letter can’t wind its way onto this page, but we will be vigilant to guard against it. The letters on this page should be those that come from the minds of our readers, not from a political campaign trying to create support. We’ll continue to verify all letters and be diligent in checking so our readers continue to have faith in what is our readers’ print version of a town square.