Negative Campaigns: Thank you for not voting

David Mark who should know better (he’s the former editor of Campaigns and Elections magazine) writes in a new book that negative campaigning is an “art”. There was a time I might have agreed with him, when media experts were producing blockbusters like the “Daisy” spot that doomed Barry Goldwater’s presidential hopes in ‘64. Negative ads were funny, horrific, memorable. Now they’re just mean and nasty and absurd, even when they’re effective, as they were with the Swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004.

Mark, in his book Going Dirty: The Art of Negative Campaigning, has a chapter on the impact of negative ads on voter turnout. He says academic research is split. “Some studies suggest negative campaigning drives up voter turnout because it gets people angry. Others conclude the practice turns people off.”

The recent California primaries would indicate the latter, featuring some of the most obnoxious, stupid and clumsy negative campaigns ever, with a lot of weird thrown in. (Example: One ad attacked Assemblywoman Jenny Oropeza for refusing to send her children to public schools. She has no children).

Such idiotic campaigning resulted in one of the lowest voter turn-outs in California history. Not that there weren’t some exciting races, including the top of the ticket-- the Democratic gubernatorial shoot-out between state treasurer Phil Angelides and state controller Steve Westly was a real nail-biter. They pummeled each other daily with attack ads that often protested the other’s negative ads. Rather than inspiring a rush to the polls, the $80 million barrage left voters weary and confused…and at home on election day.

In my 1997 book, Poison Politics: Are Negative Campaigns Destroying Democracy?, I made the point that “a more dangerous problem is the increasingly cynical attitude toward government that is poisoning our politics and causing many voters to give up and stay home.”

Three years later this “cynical attitude toward government” trend I had warned about became a full-blown political nightmare when the GOP far right took over the federal government with stunning ineptitude. Deliberate ineptitude, according to Alan Wolfe in the current Washington Monthly.

Wolfe, who teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of Does American Democracy Still Work?, writes that the credo of the Bush administration is that “if government cannot be made to disappear, at least it can be prevented from doing any good. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it…the end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.”

Or as Bush himself would put it: “You’re doing a great job, Brownie.”