The “Garbage Man” or Ragpicker

(Jean-François Raffaëlli, The Ragpicker, 1879)

A brief background: I’m a longtime political operative, with most of my career in the service of electoral campaigns, think tanks, advocacy groups, and that whole milieu. I worked for Obama in 2012, Clinton in 2016, Bernie in 2020, and am now a independent consultant. My niche is known professionally as “opposition research.”

‘Oppo’ is simply the act of examining a subject’s political, professional, and personal lives, and identifying where the friction lies. This invites all sorts of comparisons to spies and private investigators, but I always had a soft spot for a nickname Mitch Landrieu gave me when I was on his sister’s campaign for Senate: “the garbage man.” Every life leaves a trail of debris to scour, it’s just a matter of what you can glue back together.

Before modern sanitation departments, there was a different term for this kind of work: ragpicking. Often the poorest of the poor, ‘rag-and-bone-men’ rummaged through the refuse of cities like Paris and London for materials to salvage and resell. Rags for paper, bones for glue, anything that could be repurposed. That feels like as good a metaphor for opposition research as any, so the Ragpicker was born.

On campaigns, discretion was highest priority. But now I’ll use this space to try writing under my own byline for once, sharing some of the detritus that surfaces when you dive into the news cycle for a living. Public records, corporate filings, forgotten interviews, the rags and bones of opposition research.

In short: mostly politics, sometimes informative, hopefully interesting.

(Thomas Waterman Wood, Ragpicker, 1859)