Smear Your Competition?

I follow Culture Clash (a blog written by a multicultural Canadian-American), and the other day I was reading her post about the recent election and specifically the ad campaigns that occurred before election day. I started to write a comment, but I liked the topic so much I wanted to dedicate more time to it.

I too have gotten sick of the attack ads during this campaign season. As Stephanie mentioned, Wesleyan University recently published a study showing that ads based on personal characteristics of political components have increased by 6 percent since the 2008 election. I am not surprised, it seems to get worse with every election. In comparison, other countries have a distinct abhorrence to smear ads and the inevitable lies and slander that go along with them. In the recent England elections, two judges ordered a re-election for a seat of Parliament in northern England because the winning representative was found to have publicized false statements about his opponent. The statements that the liberal democrat courted Muslim militants who had advocated violence against the Labour Party candidate seem all too familiar. I would say that there have been even worse campaigns in the United States, and they will inevitably grow worse next election. Politifact (a non-partisan group that checks facts during elections) found in a recent study that most of the ads during this campaign season where barley true. They twisted facts wherever possible, and outright lied on occasion, but the damage has been done.

These ads do only sully the run-up to the election though, a lot more is at stake. This competitive and utterly poisonous atmosphere can continue after the elections, making bi-partisanship near impossible. I think the question here is what do we do to stop the vicious cycle? I think publicizing things like Frank Luntz's recent study about campaign ads would be a good start. He found that talking straight and not trivializing the issues makes the best campaign ad, not smearing your competition. Perhaps these negative campaign ads do help the party publishing them by a few percentage points, but I think the trade-off for American democracy is much worse. It worries me that here, in what we hope is the most democratic nation in the world, people are continuing to fall back on dirty campaigns rather than speaking about the issues that matter. They should be talking about the real things that people should election them for, not the trivial false statements that are taking up more and more of our time and money each year. We need to consider our combative ideas when it is election time for not only the benefit of the next two years but for the future of American democracy.

What do you think?