Arthur and InfoCision say: Stop Her Now!

Who is Arthur Finkelstein? And will his “Stop Her Now” campaign be more successful than the Stop Hillary efforts of 2000?

Republican officials close to the secretive Arthur Finkelstein have said that he hopes to be able to finance an advertising campaign similar to the one orchestrated against John Kerry last year by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Finkelstein is using the telemarketing firm InfoCision Management Corporation to raise money to smear Senator Hillary Clinton. He also has a website : www.stophernow .com

Arthur Finkelstein has had a long and colorful political career that has seen him work with some of the most reactionary politicians both at home and abroad. He runs Arthur J. Finkelstein & Associates, and during his thirty-year career he has worked for President Reagan and President Nixon. In addition to spearheading the then-little-known George Pataki's 1994 victory over Mario Cuomo, he was also a top adviser to Alfonse D'Amato and Jesse Helms during their Senate careers. But he hasn't always led his clients to victory -- in 1996 he was a major, if well-hidden, consultant to Senator Bob Dole's losing presidential campaign.

In addition, Finkelstein was also an early director of Terry Dolan's groundbreaking political operation, the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC).

Finkelstein is an international player as well Finkelstein has been active is Israeli politics. He helped Benjamin Netanyahu during his 1996 campaign for prime minister and he was an adviser to the late Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.

And you can add another element to this story; Finkelstein is a gay-financier to the Christian Radical gay bashers. Back in September 10th, 2005, four of Finkelstein's clients voted against the anti-gay discrimination bill -- Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.), Jesse Helms (R-N.C), Don Nickles (R-Okla.) and Sen. (Bob) Smith (R) of New Hampshire." According to CNN, “Homosexuality is wrong, it's immoral and it shouldn't be condoned and it certainly shouldn't be elevated to a special protected status by the federal government," declared Nickles (R-Okla.) in a Senate speech.

Strangely, that didn’t stop Finkelstein from marrying his male partner in December of 2004 in Massachusetts, one of the few states to allow what his clients want to deny to other gays and lesbians. He claimed the reason he did is that marriage provides benefits to his spouse.

He and his partner also have two adopted children, enjoying the same legal right that he has helped President Bush deny other gay couples.

Finkelstein is also Jewish, but that didn't stop him from using anti-Semitism during a 1978 South Carolina congressional race between Republican Carroll Campbell and Democrat Max Heller. A 1996 report published by the National Jewish Democratic Council summarized the story:

“According to press accounts, Campbell commissioned a poll, conducted by the notorious GOP pollster Arthur Finkelstein, in which voters were asked their views of Campbell, who was described as ‘a native South Carolinian,’ and Heller, who was described as ‘a Jewish immigrant.’ The Campbell-Finkelstein poll also asked voters whether they approved or disapproved of U.S. aid to Israel, hardly a significant issue in the campaign except that it injected Heller's religion into the race and implied that, as a Jew, he would favor Israel over the U.S. Then just five days before the election, an independent candidate attacked Heller because Heller did not ‘believe in Jesus Christ.’ Heller lost by less than 6,000 votes. Years after the election it was revealed that there had been contact between the independent candidate and the Campbell campaign, leading some observers to believe that the independent candidate had entered the race at the behest of the Campbell campaign.”

His non-political clients have included Time Magazine, Scott Paper, McDonalds, Quaker Oats and the Trump Organization. This past summer, Finkelstein was hired by opponents of the new stadium on the West Side of Manhattan being proposed for the New York Jets football team to prepare anti-stadium advertisements. Finkelstein & Associates recently entered into a joint venture with Kidron Strategies to provide consulting services in Israel specifically focusing on the corporate and consumer markets.

In a rare interview in December 2004, with Boaz Gaon of Maariv, an Israeli daily newspaper, Finkelstein seemed to be suggesting that things may have shifted too far to the right in the U.S.: “The political centre has disappeared, and the Republican Party has become the party of the Christian right more so than in any other period in modern history,” he said.

“Bush's strategy secures the power of the American Christian right not only for this term,” Finkelstein said. “In fact, it secures its ability to choose the next Republican president.”

Finkelstein told Maariv that he was troubled by the strategy of dividing the country by “values of religion and culture.”

“Bush courted the evangelical vote,” he said, “and turned these elections, in fact, into a referendum on the religious and cultural nature of America. This is my problem.”