Stuck In the Muck
A couple of months ago, I wrote this post...
Quote:
There hasn't been a race where it DOESN'T get dirty...
Every race...
Step 1) Declare to run a clean race
Step 2) Chastise your own supporters when they say something cheap
Step 3) Start calling every legitimate issue opponent raises a smear by the OTHER side
Step 4) Claim dirty tactics outside of opponent's campaign were directed by the candidate him/herself
Step 5) Say you're "forced" to go dirty because your opponent did first
Step 6) Opponent declares gloves are off
Step 7) Free-for-all
It happens in EVERY election...I didn't anticipate things would be different this time around...especially with the increased use of the internet and other electronic communications...
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In light of that sentiment, and because we have a few here that love to claim that this election is SOOOOO dirty and scummy, I give you a course on election history... 
We're not even close... 
Stuck In the Muck
Quote:
You want to talk dirty politics? Oh, we'll talk dirty. We'll talk about . . . 1800!
Thomas Jefferson was attacked by ministers who accused him of being an "infidel" and an "unbeliever." A Federalist cartoon depicted him as a drunken anarchist, and the president of Yale warned that if Jefferson came to power, "we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution." A Connecticut newspaper warned that his election would mean "murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced" -- though the paper, which is now the Hartford Courant, did apologize some years later.
In 1993. "You turned out to be a good influence on America," the editors wrote. Whoops! Never mind.
John Adams, the sitting president, got hit with his share of slung mud that year. James Callender, a journalist who was in league with Jefferson, told the country that Adams was a rageful, lying, warmongering fellow, a "repulsive pedant" and "gross hypocrite" who behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a "hideous hermaphroditical character." There was also a nasty rumor that Adams had sent his veep to Europe to bring back four mistresses, two for each of them.
Today's handwringers, who are disgusted by the tone of modern political campaigns, might be reassured (or slightly depressed) to learn that we've always been this way. Almost from the birth of the nation, presidential campaigns have been filled with vitriol and deception.
"Everybody always assumes there was a golden age of presidential campaigning that occurred 20 years ago," says Gil Troy, an American history scholar at McGill University. "Almost from the start, American politics had its two sides -- it had its Sunday morning high church sermon side, and it had its Saturday night rough-and-tumble ugly side."
Things have gotten negative in this year's presidential race lately, and there's been much discussion of when negative becomes dirty, and who's being dirty, and who's willing to get even dirtier. Reporters have been counting the negative ads, which are numerous on each side, and John McCain's wife has accused Barack Obama of conducting "the dirtiest campaign in American history," while Obama aide Robert Gibbs has said, "If people want to get down in the mud, we're prepared to get dirty."
Will anybody achieve the great lows of the 19th century, though?
The years "1800 and 1828 and the one against Lincoln, I think -- those were worse than anything we've had," says historian Paul F. Boller, who has written about the history of dirty politics and who, at 91, takes the long view of things.
Back in the day, political rhetoric was, as David Mark puts it in "Dirty Politics," "shriller, hyperbolic, and downright mean." It was racist -- more than one candidate was rumored as being half-this or part-that -- as well as hostile to certain religions and deeply personal. It was also occasionally bizarre. Historians differ on whether Jefferson was ridiculed for being raised on a diet of "hoe-cake" and "fricasseed bullfrog." During Martin Van Buren's presidency, a Pennsylvania congressman accused him of being so decadent that he landscaped the White House grounds into hills resembling "an Amazon's bosom."
Oh, "John Quincy Adams was accused of pimping for the czar," Troy says. Really. The czar of Russia. The press backing Jackson labeled Adams "The Pimp."
As historian Kathleen Hall Jamieson writes in "Packaging the Presidency," the Founding Fathers intended the nascent nation's elections to be a dignified, deliberative activity, carried out by a small number of wealthy, well-educated men. "The ideal unraveled rapidly." Vitriolic handbills and fiercely partisan newspapers took up one side or another. Laws about who could vote opened up the franchise -- somewhat, at least. Party identification was strong. Political feelings were expressed in the strong language of the time, and even people we think of now as above politics were not spared. To wit: George Washington.
"If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington," Benjamin Franklin's grandson wrote in 1796.
Or Abe Lincoln. According to an 1864 edition of Harper's Weekly, Lincoln was disparaged as a "Filthy Story-Teller," a "Buffoon," a "Usurper," a "Monster" and a "Land-Pirate," whatever that is. His enemies also described him as "A Long, Lean, Lank, Lantern-Jawed, High Cheeked-Boned Spavined Rail-Splitting Stallion," which actually makes Lincoln sound kind of hot, except for the "spavined" part. (We looked it up. It invokes horses with diseased joints, or more generally, decrepitude and decay.)
As Jamieson notes in another book, "Dirty Politics," long before there was potent television imagery juxtaposing an innocent girl with the threat of nuclear war (LBJ's '64 Daisy ad), or tying a menacing-looking black murderer to a Democratic candidate (the '88 Willie Horton ad), presidential campaigns were thick with oversimplified attacks aiming at the gut, not the intellect.
"Campaigns generally ally the favored candidate with things uncritically accepted, such as flag and freedom," Jamieson writes, "and tie the opponent to such viscerally noxious things as the murder of innocent men, women and children."
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We ain't seeing nothing new...
Not even the guy who TELLS US he "not like the rest of them" and wants to bring "change"...
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"You get the respect that you give" - cnredd
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10-13-2008, 09:06 PM
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