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CAMPAIGN
STOPS September 27, 2012, 10:09 PM
By
Peter Manseau
A month after pundits
declared the current presidential contest the “meanest,”
“nastiest,”
“most
poisonous,” and “dirtiest
campaign in history,” those summer laments already seem like poignant
reminders of a kinder, gentler time. Thanks to recent efforts to score
political points on violence in Egypt
and Libya,
and charges of class warfare rising on both sides, this mean and nasty season
has only gotten worse.
Yet as bad as this election
may seem, it is hardly original in its biliousness. Its protagonists often
appear to be reading from a borrowed script, delivering lackluster renditions
of the truly inspired negative campaign tactics that have made American
politics a blood sport from the start.
Concerned that the supposedly
hands-off topic of a candidate’s faith has become too much a factor in 2012?
Compared to the elections of 1796 and 1800, this contest has all the
inter-religious animosity of a Lutheran versus Methodist slow pitch softball
game. In the earliest of the nation’s two-party elections, the match-up of John
Adams and Thomas Jefferson gave voters a choice, according to Adams
supporters, between “God and a religious president, or Jefferson and no God!”
The pious allegedly buried Bibles in their gardens, in fear that President
Jefferson would gather holy books for the pyre upon inauguration.
Jefferson versus Adams may also have the dubious distinction of the being
the first time the so-called race card was played. Even then, Jefferson’s
rivals circulated rumors of his relationship with an enslaved woman — perhaps
beginning during his years as the United States
minister to France,
when Sally
Hemings was just 14 years old. It was thanks to the racist
undercurrents of this campaign that Jefferson, the target of more conspiracy
theories than even Donald Trump could shill, was later said to be a
mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by
a Virginia mulatto father, as was well known in the neighborhood where he was
raised, wholly on hoe-cake (made of course-ground Southern corn), bacon, and
hominy, with an occasional change of fricasseed bullfrog, for which abominable
reptiles he had acquired a taste during his residence among the French.
“Race has always been an
inflammatory subject in campaigns,” Richard Brookhiser, the author of
several presidential
biographies, told me. “In 1844, the Whigs ran slave owner Henry Clay. But he
and his running mate, Theodore Frelinghuysen, supported settling freed slaves
in Liberia.
This was not racist enough for Democrats, who attacked
them in verse: ‘De ni**er vote am quite surprising, We’s all for Clay
and Frelinghuysing.’ ”
Entwined suspicions of ethnic
difference and foreign connections run like an ugly thread through the fabric
of our civic history. The original birthers of American politics, members of
the 19th-century Know Nothing Party, were driven by nativist fears exploding in
response to the influx of Irish, Chinese and other immigrant groups. In 1856, a
popular Know Nothing candidate for president, George Law, was hoist on his own
xenophobic petard whensupposed
evidence of his foreign birth emerged. Mr. Law swore he had been born
on a farm in New York,
a year after his alleged immigration, but that did not stop his
opponents from pursuing this attack with obvious delight.
Library of Congress Anti-Whig poster
depicting Zachary Taylor as “An Available Candidate,” 1848
Nor is this election unique
in its willingness to play politics with the loss of American lives. The Obama
camp went there first with a
“super PAC”-financed ad that blamed Mitt Romney for the death of a
woman who lost her health insurance when Bain Capital closed a Kansas City steel plant. More recently,
Romney adviser Richard Williamson suggested that the deaths of American
diplomats in Benghazi
might have been avoided if his man had been on watch.
Distasteful as either of
these claims may be, they have nothing on the 1848 image of the Whig candidate
Zachary Taylor sitting on a pile of human skulls (a sharp critique of the kind
of experience he had gained during the Mexican-American War) or on the attempt
to tar Andrew Jackson as an actual
murderer of American militiamen during the War of 1812. While commanding
American forces fighting the British in New Orleans,
Jackson
had approved an execution order for six men convicted of desertion though they
had believed their tour of duty had ended. A dozen years later, a broadside
describing “The Bloody Deeds of General Jackson”
offered the iconic visual of six black coffins arranged below the presidential
candidate’s name. An accompanying hymn made these attack ads a multimedia
experience:
The regulars then he did
command
These citizens to kill
And far from home, their wives and land
Their blood he there did spill…
And God forbid, our President
This Jackson e’er should be;
Lest we should to his camp be sent,
And shot for mutiny.
These citizens to kill
And far from home, their wives and land
Their blood he there did spill…
And God forbid, our President
This Jackson e’er should be;
Lest we should to his camp be sent,
And shot for mutiny.
Library of Congress The anti-Andrew Jackson
“Coffin Broadside,” 1828.
Of course, Jackson’s
campaign could give as well as it got, and its efforts likewise have a
contemporary analogue. While some have drawn a parallel between the hidden
camera tactics behind Romney’s 47 percent video and James O’Keefe’s stealth
attack portraying Acorn as an enabler of prostitution, Jackson
supporters charged that Old Hickory’s rival for the White House, the incumbent
John Quincy Adams, was an actual pimp.
“Sex was used with special
gusto in prudish times,” Mr. Brookhiser said. “Adams was charged with
supplying an American woman to the czar when he was minister to Russia years
earlier. Adams’s supporters in turn accused Jackson
of bigamy.”
The moral character — and
intimate entanglements — of the candidates has been a common front in the
battle of for the presidency. In 1884 Grover Cleveland famously dealt with
taunts of “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” when news spread that he had fathered a child
with a woman to whom he was not married.
Library of Congress Grover Cleveland with his
mistress and child, 1884.
Less well known is a
counter-rumor that circulated about Cleveland’s
opponent, James G. Blaine. Hitting the supposedly morally superior Blaine where he lived, Cleveland
supporters claimed that Blaine’s
first-born son, who had died as a toddler 30 years before, had been conceived
before Blaine and his wife were married. In an apparent attempt to make it seem
as if Blaine
was hiding something, vandals chiseled the date of the child’s birth from
his grave.
Before we count our blessings
that we are now far removed from a time when the dead children of politicians
were considered fair game, or when an election would be framed unabashedly as a
choice between God and no God, it’s worth remembering that similar moments have
been a part of 2012 all along — from January, when Rick
Santorum endured questions about his family’s method of grieving for
his son Gabriel, to September, when Democrats faced a literal “God or no God”
question in their party platform.
If there is anything uniquely
negative about this year, it could only be the sheer tonnage of baldly hostile
messages bombarding the electorate in the dozen or so states still considered
to be in play.
“What may set apart the 2012
campaign from previous elections is the volume of negative ads,” said Melissa
Deckman, a professor of political science at Washington College.
While the use of deceptive ads by campaign organizations goes back at least as
far as Jefferson and Adams, Ms. Deckman noted, recent
research shows that while negative ads accounted for 9 percent of all
political advertising in 2008, in this election attack ads account for 70
percent of the total. “Given that Election Day is still weeks away,” Ms.
Deckman said, “from an advertising perspective, this election could well be the
most negative in history.”
Is it possible that anything
good could come of this? Negative campaign tactics — even the meanest and
nastiest — have their place in the theater of American politics, but they do
not always have their desired effect. Four years ago, Mr. Obama most likely
would not have given his pivotal speech on race were it not for the attempts to
link him to the divisive rhetoric of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Twenty years earlier, George Bush similarly turned negative associations to his
advantage when he countered concerns over his toughness with tales of his time
as a decorated fighter pilot and undeniable war hero. After enduring
questioning of his manhood at the hands of media ranging from Newsweek to
“Doonesbury,” the vice president showed that his ability to throw a punch had
not diminished by going on the offensive during a live interview with Dan
Rather – who is, it must be noted, among those currently lamenting this
election as “the
worst.”
Smear campaigns, whether they
contain a kernel of truth or are based on outright lies, allow candidates to
demonstrate how they respond under the strain of conditions most other
Americans would find intolerable. As the historian Gil Troy has written, brutal
campaigns endure not only because they let off the collective steam of
300 million opinionated Americans, but because – unlikely as it seems – they
work.
If there is to be no end to
the negativity, perhaps the question we should be asking is not “Is this
campaign the dirtiest ever?” but rather “Why have our elections been so
negative in the same ways for so long?” The enduring themes of the supposedly
worst campaigns – race, religion, sex and death – remind us of their centrality
not just to politics, but to every aspect of American life. No matter how much
the economy matters to the outcome, this election is as dirty as many others
because voters know they are choosing something other than a manager.
Given the stakes, the most
surprising part of our perpetually dirty political system is that all the
slings and arrows that once cut so deeply may later seem merely funny, or only
instructive. Today’s fighting words will be reduced to tomorrow’s interesting
anecdotes, but the true questions at the heart of every presidential election
will remain.
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