My pal Jon Mark Beilue makes a critical point in his latest column: You might think Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are tough on each other, but their attacks seem downright tame compared to what’s been done before.
Romney in particular has been whining about the personal nature of the president’s attacks. He ought to gaze back through history to see what tough campaigning really looks like.
For my money, the most negative presidential campaign was the George H.W. Bush-Michael Dukakis mudfest in 1988. That contest featured a murderer named Willie Horton, for whom Dukakis granted a furlough when he was governor of Massachusetts. Horton killed someone while on furlough from prison. Bush seized on the issue and pounded Dukakis mercilessly over a matter that was brought to light during the Democratic primary by none other than U.S. Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee.
President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign in 1964 portrayed Republican challenger Barry Goldwater as a war-monger who would destroy the world in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. And go back even farther and you’ll find political brutality the likes of which we haven’t seen since.
A larger point of Beilue’s column is that negativity works, which is why campaigns use it to make whatever point they want to make. If voters didn’t respond to negative campaigns the candidates wouldn’t take their campaigns in that direction.
But is this campaign among the most negative in history? Not even close.