More mud

People who bemoan negative campaigning need a history lesson

by Jerry Fraser

People who boo-hoo about the tone of contemporary political campaigns may be heeding their better angels, but they are ignoring history.

American political campaigns have been energetic affairs since the earliest days of the republic, unencumbered for the most part by hand-wringing on the part of participants.

In 1800, for instance, when Republican Thomas Jefferson ran for president, Federalists, on behalf of their candidate, John Adams, distributed a leaflet portraying Jefferson as a fraud, a cheat, and a coward who was “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto . . .”

The Republicans did not take this sitting down. They charged that Adams was planning to marry off one of his sons to a daughter of King George III and reunite the United States and Britain, with his family positioned as a dynasty.

And we should not think that, lacking the blessings of electronic media, post-Colonial Americans were uninterested or uninformed about politics. It’s much more likely that newspapers and political campaigns reflected the exuberance of a young and free citizenry.

Consider the election of John Quincy Adams, who was propelled to office in 1825 by a vote in the US House of Representatives even though his opponent, war hero Andrew Jackson, enjoyed great popular esteem. This high regard must have been painfully obvious the night the president-elect and his wife visited the theater. When the actors spotted Adams, they diverged from the script to make jokes about his election, and someone shortly began singing “The Hunters of Kentucky,” a paean to Jackson for his role in the battle of New Orleans. “Instantly,” writes historian Paul Boller, “a universal shout went up from the audience, followed by repeated cheerings for several minutes.”

Mainers were not spared this exuberance. Boller, author of the 1984 book Presidential Campaigns, calls Republican James G. Blaine “the most popular Republican of his generation,” but notes that many people felt he was in the tank with special interests such as the railroads. Following his nomination for the presidency in 1884, Democrats dubbed him “Slippery Jim” (or, more formally, “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine”) and the New York Evening Post began a daily column entitled, “The Blaine Falsehoods Tabulated.”

Democrat Grover Cleveland of New York beat Blaine, but not before his own dirty laundry got aired. The Republicans charged that he’d had an affair with a woman, placed her in an asylum, and was the father of an “illegitimate” child. A cartoon from the era appeared over the caption: “Ma, ma, where’s Pa? Gone to Washington, ha ha ha!” (Historical footnote: Cleveland admitted the affair but suggested the child should be named after both him and his law partner. Historical question: Was the Blaine-Cleveland race the birth of spin? “We are told,” a Cleveland supporter said, “that Mr. Blaine has been delinquent in office but blameless in public life, while Mr. Cleveland has been a model of official integrity but culpable in personal relations. We should therefore elect Mr. Cleveland to the public office for which he is so well qualified to fill, and remand Mr. Blaine to the private station which he is admirably fitted to adorn.”)

Newspapers would like us to believe they are nonpartisan guardians of democracy, but they haven’t been guardians of decorum. Following the re-election of James Madison as president, in 1812, the Connecticut Courant wrote:

The day is past — th’ election’s o’er

And Madison is king once more!

Ye demagogues lift up your voice —

Mobs and banditti — all rejoice!

The zest reflected in assertions by and about candidates manifested itself in other aspects of the political campaign. Getting out the vote, for instance, was as important in the 18th century as it is today. So on election day, 1758, George Washington, who was then running for the Virginia House of Burgesses, delivered 160 gallons of rum, beer, and other spirits to the 391 people who comprised the electorate. “Swilling” the voters became an institution in several states, Boller says, to the extent that, in 1792, the Gazette of the United States opined that “The voice of the people is the voice of grog.”

This fall, we have heard a lot of noise about the “tone of debate” and how attack ads subvert democracy because voters tune them out and are ill-informed about the issues and thus go to the polls in ignorance or stay home in disgust. This refrain comes from two sources: Losing campaigns, and members of the punditocracy who cannot abide the notion that Americans can think for themselves.

The truth, of course, is that despite TV, the Internet, and the jet airplane, political campaigns are bland by comparison with those of a century or two ago.

But that isn’t the point. The point is the reason we have elections in the first place; the point is that we Americans govern ourselves. It is our responsibility to familiarize ourselves with the candidates and where they stand on issues that matter most to us.

Holding office is a noble calling, but there is a lot at stake in any election, at any level: governance, power, money. Are we really surprised that political ads are often misleading? Do we really think most Americans accept them at face value? If you’re smart enough to see through them, don’t you suppose the next guy is?

I wish politicians did not have to spend so much time raising money, and I wish more people voted, but I don’t see any connection between those issues and so-called negative campaigning.

The fact is, we elect the leaders we deserve. We could be doing worse.

Jerry Fraser can be reached at cfraser@maine.rr.com. Boller’s book and the Web site americanpresident.org were primary sources for this column.