Holly Robinson alerted several of us to a story in yesterday’s Philadelphia Daily News, which was highlighted at Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire.
The gist of it is that campaign attack ads have all but disappeared leading up to the Pennsylvania primary, but negative campaigning continues via campaign staff on media conference calls and other such indirect forums. Money ‘graphs from the PDN story:
The result is a campaign in which candidates take the high road in TV ads and most public statements, but their staff and surrogates feed reporters negative information.
Most of the negative stories get little play beyond cable TV, talk shows and political Web sites. Thus reporters and political junkies see the race as far more contentious than most voters do.
I find this development particularly interesting when juxtaposed against my angst over negative ads during the 2006 mid-terms, and the resulting essay I published here in May 2007.
The Pennsylvania experience now proves that essay’s pedestrian conclusion, namely: Popular rejection of negative ads is the surest cure for them. And so it has been. But that’s not the most interesting part of the story. The most interesting part is that, while campaigns have responded to the voting public by dialing down their advertised rhetoric, they have not stopped negative campaigning. They’ve only cloaked it — which strikes me as oddly similar to the forced migration of “attack money” from campaigns to 527 groups.
The lesson? Perhaps this: We can’t eradicate negativity and money from campaigns anymore than we can eradicate the darker sides of our nature. We can only force these things into corners, out of the public eye.
I’m not sure that’s the ideal outcome. In fact, I fear it may be worse than the prior status quo that I once vehemently protested. Seriously, which is better — to force ugliness into hiding or keep it exposed to the light of day?
I’m not suggesting we stop trying to inject more decency into campaigns. Rather, I simply believe those of us who care about these things should learn a lesson from the Pennsylvania experience, namely: To be guarded about our expectations; to be realistic about the indelible nature of the heavy anchors weighing down our fight for a more civil body politic.