THE CAMPAIGN SEASON is young, so I could still be proved wrong, but for the moment this much seems likely: History will record that the most revolting moment of the election year came during a recent debate among the Republican presidential candidates, held in the otherwise inoffensive city of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
A question was selected from the audience (always a mistake): “Will you propose and agree,” asked an earnest young college student, “not to run any negative ads against each other?” The front-runner for the nomination, George W. Bush, put on his most serious face — absolutely smirkless. “I’ll run positive ads,” he said. “I don’t mind debates. I do mind Republicans tearing each other down.” At this his closest rival, John McCain, crossed the stage, extended his hand, and said grimly, “I’d like to shake hands right now. We will not run negative ads.” The audience erupted in applause. And as the moderator gave a breathless play-by-play — “McCain and Bush just agreed not to run negative ads!” — the two candidates tried to execute one of those awkward soul-brother hand-shakes that many middle-aged white men have seen during televised sports events but have never quite mastered themselves.
Reasonable persons may, in good faith, differ about this, of course. To them, the most revolting moment of the campaign may have come after Bill Bradley mentioned a vote Al Gore had cast in favor of tobacco companies many years ago. “This smacks of the most desperate kind of negative campaigning,” Gore responded. “He said he wouldn’t do this, but I guess he changed his mind.” (A Gore campaign spokesman was even more deeply hurt: Bradley, he said, was “the professor of petulance.”)
Or it may have come last week when Bob Dole — a war hero at Anzio — published a paid advertisement in the Des Monies Register complaining that Steve Forbes — an honors student at Far Hills Country Day — had ruined Dole’s chances of getting elected president in 1996. How? By running ads that were so . . . so negative.
Or it may have come when the campaign of John McCain (another war hero) issued a press backgrounder calling George Bush’s tax plan “political.” Yes, political: Now it can be told. Bush’s spokesman was hurt. He called the backgrounder “an attack flier.” And McCain apologized! A “cheap shot,” he said, reprimanding his staff.
Or it may have come . . . But why go on? Too many such moments present themselves, creating a pastel tableau of exquisitely sensitive politicians so easily bruised, almost constantly pained, nursing wounds too deep for tears. One candidate calling another “negative,” other candidates terrified that someone will call them “negative,” yet another candidate daring to “go negative” but only against his opponent’s negativity — this election is the Wussy Campaign, a contest among pantywaists, girly-men vying with nancy-boys to lead the world’s last remaining superpower. Politics ain’t beanbag, said Mr. Dooley. It is now.
The exception to this epidemic of wimpery is — if you can imagine — Steve Forbes. It is not easy to feel sorry for a man with $ 400 million. But watching Forbes squirm while his opponents castigate him for doing what politicians have always done can be a heartrending experience. This year, so far, he has run precisely one ad that might, according to the present delicate sensibilities, be considered unflattering to an opponent. Forbes’s ad consists of an interview with an anti-tax activist from Texas, who says Gov. Bush violated a signed pledge not to support an increase in the state sales tax. The pledge was made in 1994, and three years later Bush supported an increase in the sales tax, as part of an overall tax reform.
The ad is true, as far as it goes. It neglects to mention that Bush’s reform entailed a net reduction in taxes. And it fails to cite what the Bush campaign has also said in the governor’s defense: that the original tax pledge was signed by an autopen operated by a lowly campaign staffer. In any case, Bush and his allies have run at least three different ads damning Forbes for this one ad. “Some presidential candidates are trying to win Iowa by slinging mud,” Iowa senator Chuck Grassley tut-tutted in a pro-Bush radio spot.
Mud isn’t what it used to be. It is a commonplace — or if it isn’t, it should be — to point out that “negative campaigning” is a longstanding tradition in American politics. In the campaign of 1860 Lincoln was routinely depicted as a baboon by unfriendly cartoonists. Political enemies caricatured Grover Cleveland as a fat lecher, when really he was just fat. Andrew Jackson went to his grave believing his wife had been driven to hers by political opponents who questioned her chastity. By any traditional measure, the negative campaigning of today scarcely qualifies as such. Pointing out that an opponent broke a campaign promise is not negative. Recalling an old Senate vote that your opponent would rather forget is not negative. Calling your opponent’s wife a slut — that’s negative.
Part of the problem, of course, is that America is a much less robust country than it once was, more comfortable and self-satisfied and made uneasy by commotions of any kind. Niceness is now chief among the civic virtues. The tone of political rhetoric has softened along with the electorate, and the intermediaries in the press reflect the change. In its frequent fits of self-flagellation, the press likes to kid itself that it “thrives on conflict.” In fact, by ideological inclination, most reporters are goo-goos in the classic, League of Women Voters mold. “Partisan” is their favorite epithet. When one candidate makes unfavorable mention of an opponent’s record, however mildly, the news story will jump with verbs like “slam” and “attack” and nouns like “blast” and metaphors like “slash and burn.”
It is possible that politicians themselves have absorbed this prissy sensibility — possible but unlikely. The only good news here is that the candidates, when they denounce negative campaigning, are being completely dishonest. They’re professionals, after all, and the best of them are masters at faking the very things that the modern mass campaign makes impossible: sincerity, humor, spontaneity, emotion — “authenticity,” in the current catchphrase.
A disdain for the negative is the latest catechistic piety, mouthed for the moment and easily discarded in the long term. As professionals they surely know that politics is conflict — or as Alan Keyes put it in the Grand Rapids debate, after the Bush-McCain handshake: “Some people want to pretend that we don’t have an adversarial political system. But we do. . . . If you’re going to run on your record, [your opponents] get to speak about your record. And it’s going to be their interpretation of your record, not your own. That is not negative advertising. That is sharing with people your views, and they’re not going to get it any other way.”
If Keyes keeps talking like that, people are going to say he’s nuts — not that they’ll mean it as a negative thing.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
