Larry J. Sabato: NEGATIVE CAMPAIGNING–WHAT’S NEW?
This article is republished courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson endured a presidential campaign in which supporters of his opponent, President John Adams, labored mightily to convince the public that the then-vice president was an atheistic coward hell-bent on ripping Bibles from the homes of God-fearing Americans. A Jeffersonian writer, in turn, called Adams a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and the firmness of a man nor the gentleness or sensibility of a woman.”
In later campaigns, Andrew Jackson’s wife was referred to as a woman of the night, and Abraham Lincoln was characterized as a baboon in as many creative ways as the opposition could imagine. When Al Smith, a Catholic, campaigned across the country in 1928, his train was met in certain parts by flaming crosses, courtesy of the Ku Klux Klan.
Those examples tell us a couple of things: Dirty tricks in U.S. politics are as old as the republic, and politics ain’t a Sunday tea party.
Elections in this country are marked by a vigorous, often coarse dialogue, and that has always been the case. So just how much soil did the dirt of 2008 leave on John McCain and Barack Obama compared with other recent presidential nominees?