FRANK RICH: Nuke 'Em: “Negative advertising is the crack cocaine of politics.”

[kpete]

Frank Rich: Nuke ’Em

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All polite political society, regardless of party, deplores the negative ads that soon proliferated in the television age, as do voters in poll after poll. (Americans vocally abhor porn, too, even as they ravenously consume it.) “Negative advertising is the crack cocaine of politics” is the much-repeated maxim of the former Democratic senator Tom Daschle. In the aftermath of Booker’s admonishment of Obama, Ed Rendell, the pugnacious former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, claimed with a straight face that “if you’re in this business, none of us like negative ads.” Attack ads do “little to further beneficial debate and healthy political dialogue,” according to McCain, whose 2008 campaign outdid the Democrats in its percentage of negative ads, if not in quantity. (Remember “Celebrity,” his spot likening Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears?) Even Lee Atwater, the George H.W. Bush political Svengali who inspired the racist Willie Horton ad, among other attacks swamping Michael Dukakis in 1988, wrote a 1991 deathbed mea culpa apologizing for the “naked cruelty” of that campaign. No less a patron saint of the liberal media Establishment than Ben Brad­lee would in retrospect condemn LBJ’s “Daisy” spot as “a fucking outrage.”

...............

Whatever else Americans may want in a president in scary times, whether in the nuclear anxiety of 1964 or the economic anxiety of 2012, they prefer a known quantity and, at a minimum, a leader they find human, whatever their political differences. Despite the right’s impressive efforts to portray Barack Obama as an alien from another planet (or at least continent) over the past four years, people now know who the guy in the White House is, for better and worse. Romney is still a stranger, a blank, an enigma to his fellow citizens. No less a GOP partisan than William Kristol acknowledged as much this month when he mused, “I worry that the default will be for the devil you know over the devil you don’t.” Like Thiessen, Kristol knows there is much here for a present-day Bill Bernbach to work with.

But, as Bernbach fretted about Goldwater in 1964, Romney could yet succeed in “creating a new character for himself” before the Democrats create a frightening one for him. The task for the Obama campaign, not nearly as easy as the “Daisy” ad makes it look, is to nuke him first in 60 seconds of gut-wrenching and—dare one say it?—nauseating TV.

the rest:
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/negative-campaigning-2012-6/index5.html

[Igel]

1. Not sure rich agrees with the headline.

I like attack ads and negative campaigning. No candidate rises problems with his policy proposals, record, character, etc. All would be sweetness and light, 24/7, without negative campaigning--a bunch of perfect people with perfect plans running for the office that they are perfectly suited for.

As for Rich's comment that you don't pick the candidate you don't know, you don't pick somebody who's (re)invented himself, etc., that's patently false. Many presidential campaigns are choices of the unknown over the (better) known. This includes 2008, where Rich--were he consistent--would have to support McCain. In in 1992, Bush I.

[applegrove]

2. When tribes would go to war they would get themselves all riled up with anger as they attacked. That

way you cede nothing, egg each other on and are prepared to get more territory. Same is true for politics and only negative ads get people into the frame of mind. Why the GOP has been keeping their base angry for decades.