In 1980 the befuddled and beleaguered reelection campaign of President Jimmy Carter alleged that somehow the Ronald Reagan campaign had stolen a copy of their debate prep-book. This “fact” wasn’t revealed until after Reagan had mopped the floor with Carter in their only appearance together. For days Carter’s hacks insisted that they were the victim of a dirty trick and their friends in the media sold the story for all it was worth. No one ever got to the bottom of the case and some evidence suggests a disgruntled Carter campaign member carried out the trick. Even the columnist George Will was implicated and denounced the rumor as a smear.

Flash forward to 2008 and the game hasn’t change, but the ways and means have. If the internet has done one thing, it has allowed anyone with a certain set of skills to perform their own political dirty tricks. Who needs H.R. Haldeman and the plumbers today? In the last few weeks alone we have allegedly witnessed the college age son of a Democratic official in Tennessee hack into Gov. Sarah Palin’s personal email account. Leftist bloggers broke into the website of television pundit Bill O’Reilly and stole the personal data of hundreds of people that had signed up to pay for special access to his site. Increasingly websites are created that appear to be for one campaign when in fact they are hatchet jobs that dupe the unsuspecting. Yes, politics has always been tough, despite Pollyannaish types that insist that we are meaner now (They should look at the nasty campaigns run against Lincoln), but the internet has opened a new Pandora’s Box that campaigns must now deal with.

Its easy for us to see the great ways that the internet has improved out lives (I have even written about this previously), but there are certainly drawbacks as well. In a very real sense, the internet is like a firearm. Despite what anti-2nd Amendment gun grabbers want to tell you, a gun is a tool and can be used for good or ill. The same is increasingly the case for the internet. The same tool that allows you to access global data in real time is the one that allows a scam artist to sucker thousands with his tempting email offer of riches. The same internet that lets you review the voting records of members of congress is the one that can be used to hack into the email of a political candidate. The same internet that can stream audio and video from any corner of the Earth is the same venue that groups like Al-Qaeda can use to communicate with their sleeper cells. The same internet which campaigns can use to rally supporters is the one that many elected officials refuse to use because Freedom of Information Act requests allow anyone to read almost any email. It is now believed that no sitting American president will ever again use email during their time in office for this very reason. Like all tools, the internet has no soul and is neither good nor bad. It is the wielder of the tool that holds the power.

The one man in American politics that is most closely associated with the smarmy side of the art is Richard Nixon. Perhaps no one better embodies the triumphant highs and despondent lows of the life of a politician. Few realize from what truly humble origins Nixon arose and how he repeatedly overcame obstacles and barriers on his path to the presidency. For as much as Nixon would be associated with dirty tricks and tomfoolery, he was just as often the target of such attacks. When he died in 1994 the internet was in its infancy. One can only wonder what he would think of it today. How would his seemingly fragile ego have been able to deal with the nasty and vile “anonymous” comments that are posted beneath news stories all over the internet? Could he have used the internet to pull off tricks more deceptively devious than the bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate building? The world will never know, but the smart money says he would have used this tool to his advantage. Nixon after all still holds the record for earning more total votes for president than any man (aided of course by running in the general election three times and by winning 49 states over a hapless George McGovern in 1972.) Something tells us too that Nixon would never have let his personal email get hacked, and if it had, he would have responded in a way that the opposition wouldn’t have realized what hit them until it was too late.

The age of the internet is truly something to be thankful for. We must however never lose sight of this fact – no invention, innovation, or idea is ever greater than that which makes them great – mankind.