Paul Begala: Why We Need More Negative Political Ads

Paul Begala is a Newsweek/Daily Beast columnist, a CNN contributor, an affiliated professor of public policy at Georgetown, and a senior adviser to Priorities USA Action, a progressive PAC.

In the basement of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington there is a framed picture of Harry Truman. Behind that picture there is one loose brick. Push the brick and a secret panel opens to a staircase. Descend three flights, guided only by the faint smell of gunpowder, and you will enter what is called nefastus nefastum—the unholy of unholies. In this dank and pitiless place, men and women who have not seen the sun in months hunch over computers, fueled by speed and cheap swing-state bourbon. Their mission: to master the dark art of negative advertising.

Or not. Truth is, negative advertising is not some evil or nefarious practice. In fact, when I contributed to the Obama campaign in 2008, I wrote on the check: "For Negative Ads Only." I love negative ads. When I see a positive ad, even one from a candidate I support, my reaction often ranges from bored to annoyed. But show me a negative ad—even one against a candidate I support—and my blood starts to race. What can I say? I’d much rather eat picante sauce than chocolate.

Some of our predilection for the negative may be due to evolutionary biology. Drew Westen, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Emory University, notes that "when we were evolving, failing to pick up on negative cues could lead us to fail to escape or fight a predator." Positive cues, on the other hand, didn’t "save us from danger in the same way." Then there’s the fact that there are fewer forms of positive cues: "friendship, loyalty, romantic desire, and emotional attachment to kids, parents, and partners." Negative cues, by contrast, take a wide variety of forms: "distrust, contempt, anger, hate, fear, anxiety, sadness, pity. There are just many more ways to have negative feelings toward someone."..