The Push Poll in New Hampshire

Since last Thursday, there has been a flap going on about a push poll that has been going on in New Hampshire pushing people on Mitt's Mormon background. There are a lot of theories about this, but Mark Hemingway at National Review Online presents evidence (circumstantial, to be sure, but relatively convincing) that friends of Mitt are responsible for the polls. Basically he traces who did the calling and the relationships between that company and Mitt or the Mitt campaign.

Why? Basically to inoculate the campaign against these issues in the future:

However, there’s a growing chorus of voices speculating Romney push polled himself. “I smell a dirty trick. I suspect a pro-Romney motive to inoculate against future use of the religious issue and to breed sympathy for Romney … a 20-minute call is the work of an amateur. The long call is designed to get ALL the negatives out, to put them off limits for future attacks,” Roger Stone — a master of Republican dirty tricks — told The Politico’s Jonathan Martin. Stone pointed out that Robert F. Kennedy was behind anti-Catholic campaign tricks — calls and literature — to help get the first Catholic president elected. An anonymous website attacking Fred Thompson with ties to the Romney consultants in South Carolina earlier this cycle suggests such earnestness may not be below Romney campaigners.

Asked if it’s reasonable to think a campaign would do such a thing — push poll itself — one political consultant familiar with phone banking and dirty tricks who asked not to be identified told NRO, “I’ve done it,” he said. “But it’s usually the kind of thing that you do in a close state-senate race, not a stunt you pull under the scrutiny a presidential campaign is subjected to.”