I just wrote a reaction to the video for a facebook post after a Trump supporter asked me to watch it. I only watched the video once- is my analysis more or less correct?
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I watched the video -- very interesting, and on first viewing certainly does look pretty bad. There's some behavior in it that I'm definitely not comfortable with, and it edges right up to the ethical line, but looking closely it doesn't seem to be quite as damning as O'Keefe would have us believe. First, there's the tactic of bird-dogging. There's no question that these guys were sending people to rallies in order to get a rise. But notice what wasn't said: unless I missed it, nowhere do these guys say that the bird-doggers are making the first physical contact, or throwing the first punch. They are simply making themselves prominently visible, or behaving obnoxiously, in order to bait the Trump supporters. So who is responsible when things get physical? The person who throws the first punch. Is that the Trump supporter or the protester? Through clever editing, the video tries to make the viewer come away with the impression that the protesters are the ones doing that, but watch carefully: that's never actually said. In fact you if listen closely to what these guys are saying, the whole point is to get the Trump supporter to get physical; if the protesters were to throw the first punch it would defeat the purpose. Organized protests with the purpose of making the other side look bad are nothing new, and that's basically what bird-dogging is. Even when the riot is discussed, no one actually says that the physical altercation was started by the protesters -- only that it got physical. So yeah, these are underhanded tactics, but on the other hand O'Keefe is clearly attempting to mislead the viewer through editing to make it seem much worse than it actually is.
Then there's the way the organizations are structured: they're designed deliberately to skirt laws requiring separation between a campaign and superPACs. But the interviewees were very careful to point out the "double-blind" nature of the organizations with respect to the campaign. In other words, they're violating the spirit of the law, but probably not the letter -- they've found a workaround, and they're exploiting a loophole. It seems crummy on its face, but it's not obvious that any laws are actually being broken. Of, course, I'm not a lawyer.
Here's the part I'm not comfortable with AT ALL: that is when the guy says that he recruited "mentally ill" homeless people. Taken at face value, this seems to me REALLY uncool. On the other hand, it sounds like he took good care of them afterwards, so what are we to make of that? I don't know. I still don't like it. And how much of what he was saying about the homeless was just off-the-cuff exaggeration? It's hard to tell. So I don't know what to think about that part -- I'd like to hear what the guy has to say for himself.
So overall, yeah, there's some dirty politics here, but nothing that I can see that's beyond the pale, despite O'Keefe's attempts to gin up a scandal. Politics is a dirty business, and both sides have operatives and consultants such as these -- always have, always will. But it doesn't suggest to me that the Democrats are any more or less dirty than the Republicans -- they just happened to have a camera in the room.
