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2004 campaigns mudslinging pretty tame Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/shapiro/2004-10-28-hype_x.htmhttp://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/shapiro/2004-10-28-hype_x.htm
Campaign's mudslinging not as dirty as 1884, or even 1988
Even by the rough-and-tumble standards of 21st-century politics, from the unrelenting attack ads to the armies of lawyers prepared to fan Election Day chaos, the 1884 presidential election was as subtle as a barroom brawl.
In a world without Internet gossips like Matt Drudge and the venomous exchanges on cable TV, voters were told that Democrat Grover Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock and Republican James Blaine had penned incriminating letters about a shady railroad deal. But the campaign's low blow came six days before the election when a minister, introducing Blaine at a New York City rally of clergymen, depicted the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion."
This nasty ethnic swipe at Cleveland's Irish Catholic supporters gave the Democrats the ammunition they needed to carry pivotal New York by 1,149 votes. And in an eerily contemporary twist, the Democrats quickly organized a committee of volunteer lawyers to make sure that Cleveland's victory survived the recount.
Resurrecting this 120-year-old history illustrates that close presidential races have often been viciously contentious.
The 1884 slugfest also serves as a reminder that a single ill-advised sentence from a warm-up speaker or a campaign surrogate can easily explode into a full-scale flap when time and partisan tempers are short.
Defending George W. Bush on the Today show Thursday morning, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani stumbled into the bitter campaign controversy over reports of 377 tons of high-grade explosives that vanished from an Iraqi weapons site at a still undetermined time in early 2003. In an effort to rebut John Kerry's claims that Bush was responsible for the military's failure to secure these explosives, Giuliani said, "The actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?"
In normal times, these comments would be noteworthy only for their mangled syntax. But in the closing days of the campaign, first Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart and then John Edwards jumped on Giuliani for belittling the performance of American soldiers. As Edwards put it at a campaign rally in Minnesota, "Our men and women in uniform did their job. George Bush didn't do his job."
The politically charged dispute over the explosives, which began Monday with a front-page article in The New York Times, pivots around whether the cache of weapons disappeared before or after Saddam Hussein was defeated. Like so much else in this divisive campaign, interpretations of truth depend on partisan perspective. Kerry strategist Mike McCurry, briefing reporters Thursday on the candidate's jet, said, "We are very clearly continuing to engage President Bush on the question of the explosives because it is a metaphor ... about the argument the president makes about his stewardship of our country."
The problem is that the metaphor cuts both ways. This explosive issue can be brandished, as Kerry has, as a symbol for Bush's failure to plan adequately for the chaos has that engulfed Iraq. But since some of the missing explosives are so powerful they could be used to trigger a nuclear device, Kerry's continued emphasis on this issue also serves to underscore that Saddam did possess weapons that could be useful to terrorists.
Truth is the first casualty not only in war, but also in the closing days of a campaign.
Bush in Michigan on Thursday savaged his opponent: "This week Sen. Kerry is again attacking the actions of our military in Iraq, with complete disregard for the facts. Sen. Kerry will say anything to get elected." In truth, Kerry's attacks have all been directed at the commander in chief, not the soldiers in the field. And at this point in the campaign, every remark uttered by both Bush and Kerry can be accurately described as saying anything to get elected.
Despite all the hyperbolic rhetoric coming from both sides, this campaign has blessedly avoided any of the ugly racial undertones that had poisoned politics for more than a century.
Just 16 years ago, George H.W. Bush benefited politically from an explosive independent ad that featured Willie Horton, a black rapist released from prison under a furlough program championed by his Democratic rival, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. The coded message in that vicious commercial, which used a photograph to highlight Horton's race, directly played on white fears of crime.
Such racist scare tactics are as unlikely today on the national stage as a politician denouncing rum and Romanism. While many aspects of American life are still far from models of integration and social equality, this nation has embraced tolerance as its bipartisan standard.
True, questions have been raised about aggressive Republican plans to dispatch poll watchers to monitor for fraud in majority black precincts in battleground states such as Ohio. Although this gambit evokes memories of the segregationist South, it is solely aimed at cutting into Kerry's margins in these reliably Democratic areas. This may be a distinction without a difference, but it is still a far cry from the days when Willie Horton was a political symbol.
As bitter as the final 100 hours of Campaign 2004 may become, voters can at least take comfort that we have moved beyond 1884 or, for that matter, 1988.
Walter Shapiro's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Election Day. E-mail him at wshapiro@usatoday.com
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