You’ve got a lot more to be frightened about in the coming days than Halloween ghosts and goblins. We are entering the last week of the 2002 election seasons, so politicians – and at least as important, their consultants – will start to panic. Those way behind may simply stand at attention, wave to the lifeboats, and watch the water close in. But candidates who are just beyond the margin of error (I mean in an intuitive sense, not necessarily in a poll) will feel sorely tempted to remove whatever constraints they’ve imposed on their own campaigns in a last-ditch effort to keep their campaign afloat.
Figuratively, we’re talking about tossing frail old ladies into the water and shoving the children out of the way in order to keep buoyant.
I don’t lodge categorical complaints about so-called “negative campaigning.” As a rule, ads that contrast a candidate’s views with those of another candidate are to be preferred to the kind of fuzzy, off-point, and often dishonest “puff” pieces that the good-government types apparently prefer. “He’s been a champion of the little guy, of people without a lot of power” an ad might say about an incumbent who slavishly defends special interests, such as government monopolies or trial lawyers, against the interests of consumers or innovators. “She has fought to make our economy better and to help create jobs,” another ad might state about a legislator who has voted to raise taxes on individuals and small businesses, who create most employment opportunities, in order to subsidize a few politically connected corporations.
Politics is a serious business, about serious issues, with serious consequences. There is nothing wrong with aggressively contrasting one’s views with an opponent’s views, as long as both positions are characterized fairly (aye, there’s the rub).
Negative or comparative advertising is not the same thing as sleaze, though there can be overlap. For example, I’m not buying either the case for Elizabeth Dole being an incompetent manager of the American Red Cross and an Enron crony or the case for Erskine Bowles as a disreputable financier who stole billions from Connecticut public retirees. The facts in each situation simply don’t rise to the level of rhetoric being employed. When a moral reprobate stands for election, his or her behavior is fair game to the degree it has a bearing on present or future job performance (Bill Clinton’s scandals often but not always met this test). In general, though, when campaigns degenerate into name-calling, video tricks, guilt by association, and innuendo, the voting public is poorly served.
Sleaze is a feature of competitive elections, by the way. One way you can certainly limit or eliminate it is to adopt various kinds of “reforms” that would elevate the power of the news media, special interests, and incumbents over challengers. It almost makes one suspicious about the true motivations of the chin-tuggers and foundation hacks and senior “statesmen” who decry negative ads and promote campaign reforms.
Okay, nix the almost. They deserve suspicion.
But everyone who believes in a vibrant, aggressive campaign on substantial issues should speak up against the trivial and the venal in politics. When candidates of any persuasion indulge in it, call them on it. Social Security, war, the economy, education, civil liberties – these are among the critical issues affecting North Carolina that we should want our political candidates to weigh in on, and to attack each other about if the situation warrants. Let’s have a politics of civility, yes, but also of conviction and clash. The late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone, with whom I agreed almost none of the time, demonstrated that this was possible and desirable.