Negative Campaigning. Define It!

As a former candidate who made every effort to avoid negative campaigning, these attacks on President Obama’s ads really tick me off.  I had an opponent who was relatively new to the area and whose name was Kat.  Since I had been a much longer resident here, naturally my first fund-raising letter commented, “I am no kitty come lately”.  The reaction I got from her campaign was that I was running a negative campaign, and on, and on, and on!  One would have thought I had accused her of the most baseless of actions.  Her campaign against me was pretty awful, but we never mentioned anything about her, at any time, from that point forward.

And that is a campaign ploy.  Accuse your opponent of doing what you are doing.  Get enough people to repeat what you are saying and pretty soon it becomes “common knowledge”, and everyone says it, even though it may not be true.  This is what the Republicans use Fox News for.  They give Fox the talking point of the day or week, Fox runs with it, and without checking on whether it is a fact or not, the other rumor outlets, sometimes called news, pick it up and run with it.  And as an aside, there is nothing much that irritates me more than the phrase, “true facts”.  Has anyone, ever, for the last 50,000 years or so, heard of a “false fact”?  By definition, a fact is true. 

Back to campaigning.  A candidate’s record is fair game in a campaign.  It is perfectly all right for President Obama to rip into Romney’s record at Bain Capital, as Governor of Massachusetts, or his tax returns.  All of these are an indication of the direction, and the decisions, that Romney would make if, God forbid, he were elected.  Negative campaigning is inferring that somehow President Obama is not a real American, that there is something about him that prevents him from really understanding what America is all about, that his heritage means he can’t really understand American business.  Now that is negative campaigning, par excellence, because it is directed at some flaw in President Obama himself, and many of us believe that flaw for Romney, et al, is his skin color.  Present the record and let the people decide for themselves.

Of course we all would like to have the candidates only tout their own wonderfulness, and all that they have accomplished in their political lives.  But unless both sides pledge on a stack of Bibles, Korans, or whatever, that is not going to happen because even if they did swear to do so, their Superpacs would innocently go right ahead with the negatives and smirk that they did not pledge. 

Our entire campaigning system needs overhauling.  In my opinion three things need to happen:

1.       get the money out, and

2.       shorten the campaign to no more than six months, and

3.       overturn Citizens United.

These three steps would be a great start.  Probably everyone who reads this will be able to add to my three criteria, but they are a start.  In the meantime, stop saying that both sides are indulging in negative campaigning.  They are not!