Brilliant post by Dan Amira, illustrating that every campaign is the most negative and dirty ever, at least until the next one. I’m tempted to write this off as an inevitable byproduct of polarization, but then I start to think, when was this lost time where the two major presidential candidates supposedly had a positive, uplifting, educational campaign? Not during my lifetime, certainly. And historically, you can come up with ones far nastier even than the past few. Nothing recently has been able to compare with the largely accurate LBJ campaign charge that Barry Goldwater was a little too cavalier about nuclear war, or the largely inaccurate* Tom Dewey charge that FDR had known about Pearl Harbor ahead of time and let it happen to bring us into the war. Yes, the latter occurred during wartime. So much for the tradition of politics ever having ended at the water’s edge. Admittedly, some campaigns were more subdued than others–1976 and 1960 probably count as being among the more gentlemanly and civil in modern times. But if those are the other end of the scale…both elections wound up turning on outright demagoguery–Carter’s reaction to Ford’s comment that “there is no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe,” Kennedy’s invention of the missile gap that both he and Nixon knew was a fiction. Unless I’m wrong–and I’m no expert on historical elections, to be sure–probably only the sustained period of positive campaigns was during the early 19th Century, when America was a one-party state. Talk about the exception proving the rule.

I am a bit confused that it’s the press that keeps complaining about all the dramatic, twisted campaigns they have to cover. Wouldn’t that be preferable to boring and civil? I guess you just can’t keep them happy.

* According to Conrad Black’s book, the White House was anticipating something to happen after the talks with the Japanese in Washington broke down, and sent out a general warning to military installations in the Pacific. The Japanese attacked before the talks even ended, and Pearl Harbor got the warning late anyway.