RALEIGH — If some of what I’ve been seeing in North Carolina campaigns lately is going to be considered “dirty politics,” I’d hate to see what “clean politics” consists of. I’m afraid it would be precisely the kind of bland, vague, and vacuous discourse that bores voters and obscures voting issues.
It’s trendy to decry so-called “negative” campaign ads and to question the fitness of political candidates who talk only about what’s wrong with their opponents’ records or positions. But all too often, negativity is asserted to distract attention from legitimate questions. And presumably the reason why candidate A is running against candidate B is that A thinks he or she would better serve the public in the office than B would. What’s wrong with saying that, as long as the argument remains substantive and eschews character assassination?
Nothing, as far as I’m concerned.
A couple of recent cases serve to illustrate my point. In the Republican governor’s race, Charlotte Mayor Richard Vinroot last week challenged a statement from former Congressman Bill Cobey. In a letter to the Winston-Salem Journal, Cobey stated that he had never voted for a tax increase. Vinroot called him on this, citing several instances while Cobey was in the U.S. House in which he voted for bills that included some (mostly small) tax hikes. Vinroot was careful not to suggest that voting for a tax increase in the past was necessarily a disqualification for the Republican nomination, given that he himself had voted for some tax increases while a member of the Charlotte City Council in the 1980s.
Cobey’s camp respond by calling Vinroot’s statement immature and “character assassination.” This was a mistake. Vinroot seems to be citing the congressional record correctly, on an issue relevant to the current debate. A better response would have been simply to point out that Cobey, as congressman, had voted on net for substantial tax reductions. And if a campaign aide wrote the original letter, as I suspect, then another appropriate response would have been for Cobey to say that he hadn’t looked at the letter as carefully as he should have, and would have phrased it differently.
Sorry. Thank you. End of issue. But it didn’t happen that way.
Another case happened Thursday in the emerging general election for U.S. Senate. Announcing a proposal to spend $33 billion over five years to strengthen the nation’s readiness against terrorist threats, Democratic candidate Erskine Bowles drew a response from the camp of GOP candidate Richard Burr. Why, said a spokesman, didn’t the Clinton administration, in which Bowles served as chief of staff, take appropriate precautions against the terrorist threat when it had the chance? Specifically, why didn’t President Clinton accept a reported offer from the Sudanese government to hand Osama bin Laden over to the U.S.?
A Bowles representative replied that these questions were “dirty politics at its worse.” No, they are legitimate questions in a serious debate about the nation’s security. There might well be legitimate answers. Perhaps the Sudanese offer was a trick, or didn’t happen at all. Perhaps the Clinton administration didn’t think it could hold bin Laden on criminal charges. Perhaps it was trying to roll up the whole network and just lost track of him.
The charge of “dirty politics” is thrown around too often. What really soils the public debate is a lack of real clash on important issues that voters care about. Credibility on taxes and judgment on national security both fall into that category.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.