John Avlon, the former aide to former President Bill Clinton and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani who wrote the best book ever on the independent voters’ role in America politics (Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics), has a MUST READ on the politics of negative campaigning — on how Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s campaign could be playing with fire by not tempering over-the-top negative campaigning.
It must be read in full because Avlon provides a detailed historical political context. He addresses two of the more recent negative labels — being elite and out of touch:
What’s amazing about the durability of these narratives is that they can defy logic and still stick because of the party-label associations. For example, a Yale- and Harvard-educated grandson of a senator and son of a president somehow avoids the “elite” label, while the son of a single teenage mother on food stamps gets tagged with it.
But that absurdity is small in comparison to a new low in this election: the antichrist attack. Type “Obama” and “Anti-Christ” into Google and you’ll get 1.2 million matches. A widely circulated chain e-mail tries to make the case that Obama is the “Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40” the Book of Revelation predicts would be the antichrist. Among the folks who forwarded the e-mail is Mayor Danny Funderbuck of Fort Mill, S.C., who explained to an inquiring reporter, “I was just curious if there was any validity to it. … I was trying to get documentation if there was any Scripture to back it up.”
The journalistic accuracy site Snopes.com found it necessary to debunk such claims as false — even as a new Scripps-Howard poll found that 25 percent of Americans had heard the hateful rumor.
There is a significant step from trying to convince people that a Democrat candidate is secretly anti-American, to being anti-humanity.
He praises John McCain for calling some supporters on extremist rhetoric in public at some rallies, then adds:
Hate makes a cheap and easy recruiting tool, but hate ultimately leads to violence. Political activists are playing with fire when they attempt character assassination — the destructive impulse will last far longer than this election. By attempting to divide in order to conquer, they demean not only our democracy, but also the ability of our next president to unite our country and govern all Americans effectively.
Read it in its entirety.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.