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PALMETTO BUGS

COLUMBIA, SC – The anonymous e-mails and letters began dropping into inboxes and through front doors this summer.

One claimed that Hillary Rodham Clinton was having a lesbian affair with Huma Abedin, her aide.

Another online mass mailing cautioned of the “dark secrets” of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. A blogger claiming to support John McCain said that Rudy Giuliani‘s wife supported the killing of “innocent puppies.” Fliers appeared on cars accusing Barack Obama of being a Muslim extremist. An anonymous Web site said that Fred Thompson was a corrupt playboy.

Welcome to South Carolina, the foulest swamp of electoral dirty tricks in America. This state’s primary race has already become the sleaziest leg of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Here, political operatives know only one way to win: take your opponent’s head off.

The Palmetto State’s primary follows hard on the heels of Iowa and New Hampshire and is the candidates’ first foray into the Deep South. For Republicans, in particular, it is crucial: Since South Carolina gained its first-in-the-South status in 1980, no Republican has received the party nomination without winning the state.

“South Carolina is a do-or-die state again,” said Rod Shealy, a veteran GOP consultant, at his favorite diner, the Lizard’s Thicket. “And with the anonymity of the Internet, we’re going to see new lows in dirty politics that would have been unimaginable recently.”

Shealy knows a thing or two about dirty politics. In 1990, when running his sister’s campaign for lieutenant governor, he paid an unemployed black fisherman facing felony charges to run for Congress – in order to increase white voter turnout. He was convicted of breaking campaign laws.

Shealy is among a small band of political consultants who wield enormous influence in South Carolina. They are bitter rivals and all learned their trade from Lee Atwater, a South Carolina native and the first President Bush’s notorious and venal attack dog.

The most grizzled political veterans until recently believed that the apogee of their state’s slash-and-burn mentality was reached in 2000, when John McCain‘s presidential ambitions were emasculated by operatives working for George W. Bush.

After losing badly to McCain in New Hampshire, the Bush team knew – as one operative says – that they had to “chop him up” in South Carolina. Fliers appeared saying that McCain had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman (he and his wife have an adopted Bangladeshi girl). A whispering campaign was started claiming that his years as a Vietnamese prisoner of war had made him mentally unstable.

Bush and his former chief strategist, Karl Rove – another Atwater protégé – always denied any involvement.

The brutality of South Carolina’s Republican primaries has until now involved the state’s hatchet men putting the party’s establishment candidate – Bush in 2000 – back on track after upsets in Iowa or New Hampshire.

What is different this year is that at least four Republican candidates – McCain, Romney, Giuliani and Thompson – are all heading to South Carolina with a realistic chance of winning the state. That means that the traditional two-man showdown will be replaced by a multi-candidate massacre among a group of men ripe for attack.

The man who masterminded the destruction of McCain in 2000 is Warren Tompkins, known by some operatives in South Carolina as the “God of Hell.” He has been hired this year by Romney.

Nobody is sure who is behind the attacks on Clinton and Obama, but the claims of lesbianism and Islamic extremism have found fertile ground on right-wing Web sites.

Lee Bandy, who has written about South Carolina politics for 40 years, says of the Republican campaign: “The race is so close this year there is no telling what these guys will do to win. And a guy like Rudy Giuliani is a prime target.” The Times of London