Republican presidential hopeful Gary Bauer's Iowa campaign offices were bugged leading up to the Iowa caucuses - by a gay journalist who admits trying to spread flu germs around the staff, hoping the candidate himself would catch it, fall ill, and miss the New Hampshire primary, said to be critical to Bauer's hopes of staying in the GOP White House hunt.
Syndicated columnist Don Savage, who is known to be gay, wrote that he was so irked by Bauer's stance against gay marriage - especially Bauer's comment that a recent court ruling which re-opened legislative and political debate on the matter in Vermont was almost worse than terrorism - that he decided "if it's terrorism Bauer wants, then it's terrorism Bauer's going to get."
The online magazine Salon published Savage's essay Jan. 25. Salon, which once admitted that it dredged up information about House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde's 30-year-old extramarital affair and excused it by saying "ugly times call for ugly tactics," is now taking comparable heat for the Savage essay.
Editor David Talbot says he did not specifically assign Savage to spread any infection around the Bauer campaign and that he doesn't condone the tactic - but he published the piece and tagged Savage's byline with "The Merry Prankster". And he says Savage had nonetheless stood the ways in which "the religious right" attack homosexuals and homosexual rights on their head with the stunt.
Savage contracted the flu in Des Moines and had to be hospitalized for a short stay. While in hospital, he saw Bauer on television opposing gay marriage. He decided, he wrote, to get close enough to the candidate to give him the flu "which, if I am successful, will lay him flat just before the New Hampshire primary."
He wrote of coughing on objects in the Bauer campaign offices and even licking doorknobs when no one was looking, as well as sucking on a pen he later handed to Bauer himself. "My plan was a little malicious -- even a little mean-spirited," Savage had written, adding that he could also have been describing "the tactics used by Bauer and the rest of the religious right against gays and lesbians."
The Savage column has already rang up controversy on various news site message boards and drawn a blast from New York Post columnist Rod Dreher. "My, what tidy moral reasoning," Dreher writes. " Hate your opponent's rhetoric? Then do your dead-level best to put him and his staff in the hospital. Ugly times, after all, call for ugly tactics."
Published reports describe Bauer's Iowa campaign office as stunned by Savage's revelation. "We just kind of knew him as Dan," Iowa campaign director Loras Schulte tells Dreher. "This is trash-can journalism at its worst. I have no idea what he may have tried to infect us with."
On the World Wide Web, message board reactions to the stunt and article have variously wondered whether it would only give real homophobes gasoline to put on the fire. "Doesn't he realize," said one poster named Lazarus_Long at Lucianne.com, "that this sort of thing is going to be a magnet for anti-gay nutcases?"
The comments which irked Savage came while Bauer was appearing on MSNBC. "Our society will be destroyed if we say it's OK for a man to marry a man or a woman to marry a woman," the candidate said. Savage wrote that he then recalled Bauer having said, when the Vermont Supreme Court paved the way for a renewed debate on whether to legalize same-sex marriage in that state, that it was "in many ways worse than terrorism."
"In my Sudafed-induced delirium," Savage wrote, "I decided that if it's terrorism Bauer wants, then it's terrorism Bauer's going to get - and I'm just the man to terrorize him."
But Savage could be in for a little counter-terrorism - he could face assault charges in Iowa for his version of germ warfare, and he could also face a perjury charge because he signed an Iowa voter registration form so he could participate in the Iowa caucuses - even though he wasn't actually a resident of the state.
At first, Savage wrote, he limited his counterattack to just sending voters he was assigned to call for the campaign to Democratic caucus locations without telling them about it. Then he was invited to attend a Bauer press conference and pizza party the next day. But he wasn't able to make the party and meet Bauer - where he says he intended to hand the candidate a pen he thought he'd infected - because he was assigned a round of more phone calls to make.
Alone in the campaign office, Savage writes, and with his flu not getting any better, he "went from doorknob to doorknob. They were filthy, no doubt, but there wasn't time to find a rag to spit on. My immune system wasn't all it should be -- I was in the grip of the worst flu I had ever had -- but I was on a mission. If for some reason I didn't manage to get a pen from my mouth to Gary's hands, I wanted to seed his office with germs, get as many of his people sick as I could, and hopefully one of them would infect the candidate."
Ultimately, Savage wrote, he did get to meet Bauer, asking the candidate for an autograph - and handing him the infected pen with which Bauer signed it.
Freedom Forum, a media-oriented think tank, says Salon is treading in dangerous waters by having run the Savage piece. "(He's) acting as a terrorist, and he's using a journalistic cover to do it," says Freedom Forum's Bob Giles said. "This is the kind of unedited behavior that some will try on the Internet."
