Getting Pssssst-y in Iowa Whispering campaigns reveals the power of soft sweet slander.

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New technology has made it easier to dish such dirt. You don't have to slip a flier under a windshield wiper anymore. No more cutting out letters from the newspaper. You can unleash a little havoc with a few keystrokes or by launching a Web page. Slime by keystroke is more effective during the caucuses and primaries than in the general election because your audience is comprised largely of activists who are already known. Many of them are probably on a party e-mail list or supporter list from a previous GOP campaign. Those lists are available to lots of different campaigns. The group participating in the straw poll is so small and so active, they're still trading gossip from the last campaign.

For cash-strapped candidacies, a whispering campaign is also a great value. They don't cost much, and they go to the heart of a voter's assessment of a candidate. Because the information conveyed usually exposes a secret or pretends to make a hidden discovery, they immediately call into question a voter's broader trust in the candidate being targeted. A whispering campaign is also an easy way to take on well-funded candidates. No one is going to compete with Mitt Romney using traditional methods. He's blanketed the airwaves, has phone banks dialing into homes multiple times a week, and he's spending good money to make sure his voters have an air-conditioned ride to the voting booth.

There's no evidence the new attacks on Romney are coming from a particular campaign, and they don't need to be officially sanctioned anyhow. Volunteers can empower themselves; low-budget campaigns really encourage volunteer enterprise. If a volunteer is caught, campaigns can distance themselves and say they had no idea. (Sometimes campaigns actually don't know, as was the case when a Mike Huckabee supporter mentioned Sam Brownback's Catholicism in a way Brownback found offensive.)

The problem for anyone trying to benefit from a whispering campaign is that because they are so easy to manufacture, voters tend to treat the e-mails and phone calls like spam. To elevate the attack, then, you have to sell your product with data, facts, and the appearance of veracity. If everyone's got something bad being peddled about them, the whispers that work best are the ones with data, images, and a message—which is why the anti-Romney e-mails that direct you to a video of him expressing his pro-choice stances are particularly effective.

The Romney campaign is not addressing the whispering campaigns directly under the time-honored rule that when you're explaining, you're losing. Romney is the front-runner in Iowa, and since his campaign wants to talk about something other than his pro-life record, they don't care to bat back the charges directly.

For candidates farther down in the polls, a whispering campaign is something to crow about. It means you've arrived. You're willing to risk taking a hit for the underlying charge if you can make people think you're enough of a player to be worthy of having someone attack you. The only thing worse than being slanderously whispered about then, is not being whispered about at all.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

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