Do Americans Love Dirty Politics?

Here's a dirty little secret about dirty politics: Americans love it.

American voters and TV pundits might talk about high-minded campaigns, but political scientists and historians say it's the political buzz and the horse race that get the blood going. That's why such tactics have been used in campaigns here for two centuries....

Julian Zelizer, a Boston University history professor, said smear politics is as American as apple pie.

"Americans like a good hard-fought football game," he said. Political campaigns know what interests voters, and realize that attack ads and mudslinging are winning tactics. "If voters wanted to hear about Social Security privatization, then we would hear politicians talk about it," he said.

Gil Troy, a professor and expert on U.S. political history at McGill University in Montreal, says that Americans throughout history have been conflicted about ugly campaigns. He collects quotes about people fretting about nasty campaigns back into the 19th century.

"It's a fact of political life, especially when the stakes are high, the country is polarized and partisans - on both sides - are angry, as they are today," he said.

Ugly campaigns have been an integral part of American campaigns back to the Founding Fathers. One 1793 cartoon, "A Peep into the AntiFederal Club," portrays Thomas Jefferson as a man who lusts only for power, and depicts the devil looking on, musing: "What a pleasure it is to see one's work thrive so well."

Politicians in the 19th century didn't have to worry about libel laws, and ugly, name-calling campaigns were common. The 1828 campaign stands out, with John Quincy Adams supporters accusing Andrew Jackson of murder, gambling, slave trading and treason. Jackson supporters returned fire, accusing Adams of pimping children for the Russian czar, stealing and gambling.

The campaign got so raucous that Jackson's mother and his wife, Rachel, were both called prostitutes. Rachel Jackson died of a heart attack in 1828, which Jackson blamed on his critics.

In the 1884 campaign, "Uncle Jumbo" Grover Cleveland, son of a Presbyterian minister, was accused of fathering an illegitimate child, and opponent James Blaine was labeled "the continental liar from the state of Maine." Republicans heckled Cleveland with the verse: "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" - to which Democrats rejoined after the election: "Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha."

Communism replaced sex as a theme of dirty politics in the 20th century, reaching a climax with charges by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., that Harry Truman's administration harbored communists. In the 1960s, neither John F. Kennedy's notorious personal life nor Richard Nixon's foul mouth was mentioned. But barely 16 years later, Jimmy Carter found himself mired in controversy after admitting he lusted in his heart.

Tim Blessing, a historian at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa., said voters closely monitor how candidates respond when mud flies. "It's a test of what's inside a candidate. It's really a shorthand way of deciding whether a president will stand up to a plane shot down in China," he said.

He recalled that Democrat Edmund Muskie's 1972 presidential bid collapsed after the candidate teared up when a New Hampshire newspaper attacked his wife, and Democrat Michael Dukakis failed to react with sufficient empathy in a 1988 presidential debate when asked what his reaction would be if his wife were raped and murdered.

"Campaigns over the last 25 years have become a lot more brutish," Blessing said, adding that the social issues dividing America such as abortion and gay marriage defy a political solution, and are being fought out by political partisans against an economy that is being transformed from the industrial age into the information age.

"The issues are very personal," he said. "I don't expect this blue-red-state issue to be worked out in less than a generation."