Paul Vitello: Low Blows on the Campaign Trail, Not Newer, but Lots Faster
When Thomas Jefferson found himself accused of planning to burn all Bibles and legalize prostitution if elected president in 1800, he was ready with a counterpunch that might make today’s most vitriolic campaign operatives stop short, if only to gape upon the greatness that once was presidential campaign slander.
Jefferson’s rival, President John Adams, was endowed with a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman”; and if re-elected he would crown himself king; and, by the way, he was “mentally deranged.”
The author of the attacks was not Jefferson himself, of course, but a master poison-pen pamphleteer named James Callender, who, historians have since determined, was bankrolled completely by Jefferson. (For his efforts, Callender spent nine months in prison under the Sedition Act for saying those things about a sitting president; Jefferson pardoned him immediately after defeating Adams and taking office.)
So, if this year’s entries in the annals of presidential campaign smears seem likely to reach depths never before plumbed — the latest example, some would say, being the book “Obama Nation,” which suggests that Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, may be a drug-addicted, Muslim, radical leftist — they probably won’t.
For raw, crushing smear power, the 1964 “Daisy” ad, made for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign and suggesting that the election of the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, would mean the end of life on earth, has still never quite been equaled.
And the 11th-hour telephone “survey” of Republican primary voters in South Carolina in 2000, asking “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” will probably keep its place on the Mount Rushmore of smear for a while.
But while hermaphroditical characters and nuclear madmen may be missing, historians and others say the 2008 presidential campaign has achieved a level of smear and counter-smear sophistication that is unprecedented.
“The viral marketing we are seeing is simply fascinating,” said Sid Bedingfield, a visiting professor of journalism at the University of South Carolina who is the former chief of CNN’s domestic news coverage. “The speed with which the Obama campaign can respond to allegations has been quite impressive, for example.”
For a long time there was a debate in the world of political professionals about when, and how much, to respond to the other side’s brickbats.
But the very notion of viral marketing, a phrase that describes the exponential multiplication of e-mailed campaign messages sent to one network of people who send it on to another reflects the answer that has emerged from that debate: Never wait. Everything is moving at warp speed.
“The lesson of the last 20 years is to respond immediately and aggressively, and across a broad front,” Professor Bedingfield said.
By most accounts of campaign professionals, campaigns operate now like orbiting spacecraft — moving through space 24 hours a day, seven days a week — and are every bit as susceptible to sudden disaster.
The unending news cycle, the explosion of the blogosphere and the freelance work of independent groups like the Swift Boat veterans of 2004, whose campaign severely undercut John Kerry’s bid for president, has made every campaign entourage a kind of road crew cum paramedic team.
“When the Swift Boat ads hit us, it was obviously a serious matter, aimed straight at John’s character,” said Tad Devine, Mr. Kerry’s campaign manager. “We had a difficult decision to make.”
This year, some candidates have figured out how to turn the so-called interactivity of the new age of politics to their advantage. In June, plagued by Internet rumors about its candidate’s patriotism and his religion, Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign launched a Web page, “Fight the Smears,” that in effect can take the negative power of viral marketing and bend it, like Superman, to send it back where it came from and beyond.
Supporters who get such e-mail messages can visit the Obama site to access official campaign rebuttals to dozens of accusations, and then use the site to forward them to those who sent and received the original message.
Still, for all the new technology, the essential text of smears today is about the same as it has always been, said Paul F. Boller Jr., a former history professor at Texas Christian University and author of “Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush.”
“Religion and sex, and whether the other guy is a real ‘man,’ ” Mr. Boller said. “It boils down to that.” The difference now: “If Winfield Scott’s people went out and attacked Franklin Pierce as a coward,” he said, referring to the election of 1852, which Pierce won, “well in those days it took a while for that idea to get around.”
The rhythm of campaigning may have quickened, but the notion that a counterpunch delayed was a counterpunch denied did not seem to take hold in conventional wisdom until 1988.
That year, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts fell under the wheels of a negative campaign juggernaut — watching from a dignified remove as the supporters of George H. W. Bush wiped out Mr. Dukakis’s 17-point lead by defining him as the man who furloughed the rapist-killer Willie Horton. Largely in response, Bill Clinton’s famous 1992 campaign “war room” made it a policy to rebut or refute opposition accusations within 24 hours.
In the 2004 campaign, when Mr. Kerry came under attack in a television ad campaign and a book co-written by Jerome Corsi, the author of “Obama Nation,” disputing his Vietnam record, Mr. Kerry held back...
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Jefferson’s rival, President John Adams, was endowed with a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman”; and if re-elected he would crown himself king; and, by the way, he was “mentally deranged.”
The author of the attacks was not Jefferson himself, of course, but a master poison-pen pamphleteer named James Callender, who, historians have since determined, was bankrolled completely by Jefferson. (For his efforts, Callender spent nine months in prison under the Sedition Act for saying those things about a sitting president; Jefferson pardoned him immediately after defeating Adams and taking office.)
So, if this year’s entries in the annals of presidential campaign smears seem likely to reach depths never before plumbed — the latest example, some would say, being the book “Obama Nation,” which suggests that Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, may be a drug-addicted, Muslim, radical leftist — they probably won’t.
For raw, crushing smear power, the 1964 “Daisy” ad, made for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign and suggesting that the election of the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, would mean the end of life on earth, has still never quite been equaled.
And the 11th-hour telephone “survey” of Republican primary voters in South Carolina in 2000, asking “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” will probably keep its place on the Mount Rushmore of smear for a while.
But while hermaphroditical characters and nuclear madmen may be missing, historians and others say the 2008 presidential campaign has achieved a level of smear and counter-smear sophistication that is unprecedented.
“The viral marketing we are seeing is simply fascinating,” said Sid Bedingfield, a visiting professor of journalism at the University of South Carolina who is the former chief of CNN’s domestic news coverage. “The speed with which the Obama campaign can respond to allegations has been quite impressive, for example.”
For a long time there was a debate in the world of political professionals about when, and how much, to respond to the other side’s brickbats.
But the very notion of viral marketing, a phrase that describes the exponential multiplication of e-mailed campaign messages sent to one network of people who send it on to another reflects the answer that has emerged from that debate: Never wait. Everything is moving at warp speed.
“The lesson of the last 20 years is to respond immediately and aggressively, and across a broad front,” Professor Bedingfield said.
By most accounts of campaign professionals, campaigns operate now like orbiting spacecraft — moving through space 24 hours a day, seven days a week — and are every bit as susceptible to sudden disaster.
The unending news cycle, the explosion of the blogosphere and the freelance work of independent groups like the Swift Boat veterans of 2004, whose campaign severely undercut John Kerry’s bid for president, has made every campaign entourage a kind of road crew cum paramedic team.
“When the Swift Boat ads hit us, it was obviously a serious matter, aimed straight at John’s character,” said Tad Devine, Mr. Kerry’s campaign manager. “We had a difficult decision to make.”
This year, some candidates have figured out how to turn the so-called interactivity of the new age of politics to their advantage. In June, plagued by Internet rumors about its candidate’s patriotism and his religion, Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign launched a Web page, “Fight the Smears,” that in effect can take the negative power of viral marketing and bend it, like Superman, to send it back where it came from and beyond.
Supporters who get such e-mail messages can visit the Obama site to access official campaign rebuttals to dozens of accusations, and then use the site to forward them to those who sent and received the original message.
Still, for all the new technology, the essential text of smears today is about the same as it has always been, said Paul F. Boller Jr., a former history professor at Texas Christian University and author of “Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush.”
“Religion and sex, and whether the other guy is a real ‘man,’ ” Mr. Boller said. “It boils down to that.” The difference now: “If Winfield Scott’s people went out and attacked Franklin Pierce as a coward,” he said, referring to the election of 1852, which Pierce won, “well in those days it took a while for that idea to get around.”
The rhythm of campaigning may have quickened, but the notion that a counterpunch delayed was a counterpunch denied did not seem to take hold in conventional wisdom until 1988.
That year, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts fell under the wheels of a negative campaign juggernaut — watching from a dignified remove as the supporters of George H. W. Bush wiped out Mr. Dukakis’s 17-point lead by defining him as the man who furloughed the rapist-killer Willie Horton. Largely in response, Bill Clinton’s famous 1992 campaign “war room” made it a policy to rebut or refute opposition accusations within 24 hours.
In the 2004 campaign, when Mr. Kerry came under attack in a television ad campaign and a book co-written by Jerome Corsi, the author of “Obama Nation,” disputing his Vietnam record, Mr. Kerry held back...