Remember Freedom's Watch? The supposed conservative answer to MoveOn? They ran some pro-Iraq War ads last year, and helped the GOP with some ads in the special election for OH-05. Since then, however, they've been quiet. They did nothing to help the GOP as Bill Foster won Dennis Hastert's seat in Illinois. A couple weeks ago their President announced his resignation, the latest in a series of staff departures. This week, however, Freedom's Watch announced a new hire: former National Republican Congressional Committee and Mitt Romney aide Carl Forti.

Forti's hiring should quiet some nerves among Republican strategists who saw Freedom's Watch as largely without a clear mission with just eight months until the 2008 general election. The departure of former president Brad Blakeman earlier this month was a clear sign of the discontent among donors and others affiliated with the group. (The group has not yet filled Blakeman's vacancy.) [...]

Forti's hiring shows that Freedom's Watch is moving in a strong direction. But, in truth, there isn't much time left to organize a large and sophisticated soft-money venture.

Here's a nice taste of the kinds of ads NRCC ran during Forti's tenure:

One advertisement accused the rival candidate of billing taxpayers for a call to a phone-sex line. One alleged that a candidate "fixed" his daughter's speeding tickets. Still others stated that a candidate endorsed a "coffee talk with the Taliban," and that another was supported by the Communist Party. Each charge was misleading at best, demonstrably false at worst. Yet the National Republican Congressional Committee paid for each of those ads last year, and its leaders said they could do nothing to pull them, even after some of the Republicans whom the ads were designed to help demanded that they come down. Now, four months after Republicans lost control of Congress, many of their former candidates are calling for major changes at the NRCC. They depict the committee as a rogue attack-ad shop that shielded party leaders from having to account for the claims in their ads -- encouraging over-the-top accusations that often hurt GOP candidates. "They weren't just attacking my opponent -- they were, bit by bit, destroying a reputation that I had spent years and years building," said Ray Meier, a Republican candidate in upstate New York whose Democratic opponent was wrongly accused of making adult fantasy calls.

Since Freedom's Watch doesn't appear to be 100% financially prepared to run a huge television budget, it may not be able to disseminate slime at saturation level. But remember, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had a modest budget.

Furthermore, it costs very little money to employ one of the more insidious kinds of electoral dirty tricks: deceptive robocalls. This is TPM the week before the 2006 election:

What we're seeing is an apparent coordinated effort from the NRCC -- the House GOP committee -- to place calls that appear to be from the local Democratic candidate and then automatically call the same number back as many as seven or eight times each time the caller hang-ups. If the caller listens to the whole message it goes on to bash the Democratic candidate. But if the caller hangs up prematurely, the computer calls right back. Hang-ups are the achilles heal of robo-calls. So this seems to be an attempt to cover for that weakness by making those who hang up think the Democratic candidate is basically harassing them with phone calls. The GOP wins either way.

Robocalls are dirt cheap: between 5 and 15 cents per call. And they appeared to have swung some incredibly close elections to the GOP.

When the Democrats filed complaints against the NRCC for not putting the legal disclaimer announcing who paid for the call at the beginning of the message, what was Forti's response?

"We comply with all federal laws and regulations regarding political phone calls."

Except when they don't.

Freedom's Watch may not end up with the same kind of cash that MoveOn gets from their (mostly small) donors. They certainly won't have the hordes of committed activists. But with folks like Forti in senior positions, expect them to figure out how to perpetrate dirty tricks on the cheap.