I disagree copletely and some polls don't match yours, but McCain needs to deliver "red meat".
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You call it negative campaigning, but there is no such thing.
The top campaign advisers for presidential nominees John McCain and
Barack Obama argued on FOX News Sunday over which campaign was employing the harshest tactics to scare voters.
After sparing back and forth; they sort of ended on this note, giving you a real picutre of what these "campaign managers" feel about each other... not just their candidate.
The men also pulled no punches up over their own careers, with Axelrod asking Davis if his job as a lobbyist meant he made a million dollars selling access to McCain, and Davis accusing Axelrod of wanting to run Washington in the same way as Chicago's politics are conducted.
(This isn't like we're competitors and stay away from each other; this is genuine & mutual dislike and disrespect between the two gentlemen.)
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Historian and author Joseph Cummins is no stranger to the dirty underside of the American democratic process. His latest book, Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots, and October Surprises, chronicles the campaign smears, attacks, and misdirections that have typified U.S. elections since George Washington’s win in 1789. The upshot of Cummins’s book: campaigns are no dirtier now than they were in the past. He agreed to answer our questions about his book.
Q: From your research, have you found any overarching trends among presidential candidates, political parties, and campaigns?
A: Anything for a Vote came about because I was fascinated by commentators in recent presidential contests claiming that
American politics is getting nastier and nastier — lots of hand-wringing over whether democracy would survive the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Every election, it seemed, was getting dirtier and dirtier.
But is this really true? After researching every presidential contest from 1789 to 2004, my answer is that elections are not getting dirtier. They’re just as dirty as they have always been. Whether that’s a heartening trend depends on your point of view. I myself am a great fan of the unruly democratic process, which I think will always be unruly.
In terms of trends, a rough rule of thumb is that incumbent parties tend to play the most dirty tricks, perhaps because they have the ways and means to do so. It’s also true that parties with the strongest ideologies — be they Democratic or
Republican — fight dirtier, possibly because they are not only pushing a candidate, but an entire way of life.
Both parties at different times in American history have been guilty of mind-boggling attempts to influence elections. In the 1880s, one of the worst decades in terms of dirty tricks, Republicans sent bagmen to Indiana — then a pivotal state — with hundreds of thousands of dollars in two dollar bills (dubbed “Soapy Sams” for their ability to grease palms) in order to purchase votes. The 1960s was the era of Democratic dirty tricks — in 1964, Lyndon Johnson oversaw one of the most corrupt elections ever, against Barry Goldwater.
In 1840, the American Whig politician Thomas Elder had a eureka moment when he wrote to a friend: “Passion and prejudice properly aroused and directed do about as well as principle and reason in any party contest.”
I think this has been the guiding dictum of presidential politics all throughout our history.
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