ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, Jan. 17 2008

Buck up, candidates: Negative ads used to be worse
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Democrats are bickering over race, gender and character. Republicans are
harpooning each other with negative ads about tax hikes and flip flops. And
pundits are warning that this volatile primary season could be the start of the
nastiest presidential election ever.

Given the strong correlation between the competitiveness of a political race
and its negativity, it probably is true that this year's wide-open nomination
battles and the general election that follows will be caustic, bruising
affairs. But the notion that negative campaigning is a recent stain on
America's otherwise unblemished record of noble political rhetoric is laughable.

Barack Obama may be appalled that Hillary Clinton's surrogates would criticize
his past cocaine use, but the Clinton attack machine has nothing on the
supporters of John Quincy Adams. In 1828, they blasted rival Andrew Jackson as
a butcher, his wife as an adulterer and his mother as a prostitute. Jackson's
camp responded as expected in his day: They accused Adams of having helped the
czar of Russia seduce an American girl for political profit.

Mike Huckabee's decision to withdraw an attack ad against Mitt Romney may have
warmed the hearts of Iowa voters, but it would have puzzled voters in the
election of 1800. Accustomed to rough-and-tumble politics, they saw Thomas
Jefferson's backers accuse President John Adams of employing his vice president
as a pimp, while Adams' supporters branded Jefferson as an atheist libertine
who plagiarized in writing the Declaration of Independence.

A platitude in politics is that arguments about issues are acceptable but
personal attacks are not. It's a nice sentiment, but American politicians have
ignored it for centuries.

During his presidential bids, Abraham Lincoln's critics called him a buffoon
and mocked everything from his gaunt frame to his wife's spending habits. Old
Abe accepted personal attacks as a fact of political life and even appointed
several of his fiercest Republican rivals to his cabinet. "I have endured a
great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of
kindness, not quite free from ridicule," he once wrote. "I am used to it."

Such stoicism is conspicuously absent among today's presidential candidates.
Most play to the pundits by jockeying for the title of Most Victimized by
Negative Ads — even as they stealthily return fire through surrogates, shadowy
websites and their own sideways digs.

It is an odd game, based on the assumption that negative ads demoralize voters
and endanger democracy. Kenneth Goldstein, a political scientist at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the opposite is true — and he has the
research to prove it.

"Campaign Advertising and American Democracy," a new book Goldstein co-authored
with scholars Michael Franz, Travis Ridout and Paul Freedman, draws on an
extensive database of ad buys, advertising content, voter surveys and election
results from recent years to refute the idea that negative advertising
depresses voter turnout. When I interviewed him recently about his findings,
Goldstein said voters often become more engaged and informed by negative ads
than by positive ones because negative ads tend to be more factual,
policy-oriented and attention-getting.

Negative ads can backfire when they cross the line into malice, pettiness or
bigotry, of course. Most of us do not want to see presidential candidates
insulting each other's mothers, heritage or physical traits.

But our age of global terrorism is a serious one, and it demands seasoned
leaders. A candidate who cannot withstand the pressures of the 24-hour news
cycle and today's relatively civilized attack ads will be no match for al-Qaida
or Ahmadinejad. It seems only fitting that our presidential candidates are
subjected to a level of scrutiny that matches their ambition — for our sake and
for theirs.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television host and St. Louis-based
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.