From the Washington Post, “A Way Back to the High Road” by David Broder It’s become a quadrennial tradition more reliable than the Olympics and almost as boring. Every presidential election, the media shed crocodile tears over how negative the campaign process has become. Today, David Broder waddles in to participate, helpfully illuminating the path back to the high road:
Right – like the qualifications of the candidates aren’t a “real issue.” What’s most bothersome about such articles aside from their sheer tedium is how spectacularly mistaken they are. American politics ain’t beanbag, and they never have been. Andrew Jackson’s wife was hounded to her death by his political opponents pushing stories about her being a bigamist. (Lucky for them Old Hickory wasn’t the vengeful type.) The 19th century also produced the memorable high-road slogan, “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa? Gone to the White House Ha-ha-ha.” As Broder was probably around for that campaign, it’s surprising he’s forgotten it. Since every American presidential campaign has been a negative low-road affair, one might ask if there’s a systemic reason why this is so. And guess what? There is! Politics is one of life’s very rare zero sum games; each vote your opponent gets is one that you won’t. You’re in direct competition with your opponent, and the competition is fierce. So why the low road? Your opponent’s central premise of his campaign, regardless of who he is or what party he represents, is that he’s fit to govern. Scratch that – his central premise is that there’s no person in the country more fit to govern. We’re not electing a platform of ideas, but a human being. So either you grant your opponent’s central premise regarding his spectacular nature, or you dispute it. If you dispute it, things will necessarily get a bit ugly. You can try to mitigate the harshness, but such efforts are transparently disingenuous. Take the Obama campaign and its attacks on John McCain. The Obama machine’s message is essentially, “We have a great amount of respect for John McCain. But he is a senile warmonger who has sold his soul to George W. Bush.” The prefatory comment about how much they respect McCain is a weak effort to claim the high road that does absolutely nothing to soften the criticism that follows. Not that the criticism needs softening. It’s perfectly valid for each campaign to make a case why the other guy shouldn’t be president. Indeed, they would be remiss if they failed to do so. If the McCain campaign granted Obama’s contention that He’s qualified to govern because He gives nifty speeches, has great judgment and got good grades in law school, McCain supporters should launch a class action lawsuit claiming damages for campaigning malfeasance. When Obama refers to negative campaigning as “part of the politics of the past that we have to move beyond,” he’s obviously just scratching his itch to spew his patented Hope/Change baloney. Even given His fondness for Utopian rubbish, Obama surely knows that as long as American politics boils down to one person running against another, attacking one’s opponent will never belong to the past.
