Dirty Tricks Plague Southern Fried Republican Race

COLUMBIA, S.C.<br>Jan. 17, 2008&#151; -- As Sen. John McCain campaigned in Aiken, S.C., today, negative attacks were very much on his mind.

"I think most South Carolinians think that there's no place in South Carolina politics for this kind of thing," McCain told reporters.

It was in the Palmetto State eight years ago, campaigning against then-Gov. George W. Bush, that McCain and his family were attacked in often personal terms in fliers, on radio, on television and in phone calls.

This time around, McCain and his allies are pushing back.

McCain backer Senator Lindsay Graham, the Republican who represents the state in the seat that was long held by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., asked potential supporters, "Has anybody gotten a phone call? What I want you to do is chill this garbage."

South Carolina has a reputation for hardball politics.

"If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch," Warren Tompkins, a political consultant to Bush in 2000 who currently works for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

The 2008 political season has seen its share of rabid attacks. Katon Dawson, the state chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, received a Christmas card, reputedly from Romney.

"It's a fake card that had quotes out of the Book of Mormon, and it was a Christmas card from the Romneys and said 'Paid for by the Boston Tabernacle,' which it was not," Dawson said.

Another flier from a fringe veterans group questions McCain's Vietnam War heroism. McCain, a decorated veteran, spent five years in a prisoner of war camp in Hanoi.

McCain's campaign -- saying it learned its lesson in 2000 -- forcefully pushed back against the charges with a "truth squad".

But Tompkins says the McCain campaign has brought more attention to the attacks, which he calls minor, than they otherwise would have gotten.

"It looks like the truth squad needs to look in the mirror and have a debate with themselves, Tompkins said, "Because they're the ones bringing the stuff up and bringing attention to stuff that nobody knows anything about".

Tompkins also added that McCain's campaign was trying to make South Carolinians feel guilty about his 2000 loss by bringing up what he sees as minor attacks.

Meanwhile, automated phone calls have spread dirt across the state about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's chief rivals, including McCain and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson.

In the calls an unidentified voice says, "Sen. Fred Thompson did not make solving America's illegal immigration problem a priority."

Huckabee has publicly asked the group behind those calls to stop, but just two days before the primaries in South Carolina Thompson accused Huckabee of complicity in their use.