Shock, horror: Presidential campaigns are nasty. Everyone is lamenting the negative tone of the current campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. In Florida, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich spent more than $19 million on television and radio ads, 92 percent of them negative. Romney pilloried Gingrich for being an “influence peddler” and a “failed leader”; Gingrich claimed that Romney, as Massachusetts governor, tried to force elderly Holocaust survivors in nursing homes to eat nonkosher food.
But while the sums spent on sliming opponents have soared, negative campaigning is hardly new. Take the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, often cited as the epitome of democratic debate. As historian Harold Holzer pointed out this week in The Washington Post, those exchanges featured “highly personal attacks” and even race-baiting: Douglas said America was created “for the benefit of white men” only, while Lincoln stressed that he opposed “the political equality of the white and black races.’’ In 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s backers called President John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character,” and Adams’s men described Jefferson as “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” Later, Andrew Jackson was portrayed as the son of a prostitute, and John Quincy Adams as the Russian czar’s procurer. So maybe the tawdry tone of this year’s race reflects not our fallen age, but fallen humanity. “Man passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud,” Robert Penn Warren wrote. “There’s always something.” And pols will always try to sniff it out.
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