Justifying the means

Something has changed in the McCain camp. The Straight Talk Express has essentially derailed; reporters now travel separate from the candidate, something previously mocked by McCain, and open-ended question time has dwindled due to McCain’s newfound clench on his specific talking points. He has refused to answer hardball questions such as one asked by a “Time” reporter: “Is there anything so far about this campaign that you wish you could take back or you might revisit when it’s over?” No response.

More importantly, however, is McCain’s shift from his high-road, policy-based campaign approach to an Obama assault approach. During the summer he issued ads ridiculing Obama with comparisons to Paris Hilton and accusations that Obama would “rather lose a war than lose an election.”

This is disheartening. This shift represents something greater than different and more lowball campaign tactics. It is a change from conservative optimism to go-for-the-jugular negativity. McCain has unfortunately turned to the Bush style of campaigning. George W. Bush and his father left a campaign legacy of pessimistic sarcasm that attempts to paint rivals as unpatriotic, weak or elitist.

This was not seen just a few decades ago with Ronald Reagan. He attacked his opponents on policy with optimistic confidence that his ideas and philosophies were truly better than the status quo of exhausted industrial-age liberalism. His most well-known ads were a series titled “Morning in America” that included magnificent American images but not his opponent’s name.

George H.W. Bush and Lee Atwater, his political consultant, bestowed upon U.S. politics the type of sarcastic negativity that would later capacitate Rush Limbaugh’s niche. During the campaign against Michael Dukakis, Atwater conducted a series of focus groups involving blue-collar East Coast Democrats that revealed such fodder as that Dukakis was “against” the Pledge of Allegiance and that he ran a weekend prison-release program which permitted Willie Horton, a felon in a Massachusetts prison, to go on a killing spree.

Atwater died before the Clinton election, and Bob Dole avoided these tactics for the most part. However, the campaigning style of Karl Rove saw a return to these methods with the “independent” Swift Boat campaign in 2004. Now McCain has fallen victim.
I’m not saying the Democrats or Obama have been entirely innocent here, but let’s face it – in all reality they’re just not very good at personal assaults. The Republicans are the ones using the strategy successfully.

And that’s what’s most disappointing: It’s working. Since McCain has shifted his campaign strategy, he has been rising in the polls and steadily catching up with Obama.

You can’t really blame the guy for trying to win the election. Sadly enough, I think it insinuates a lot about our political system when a candidate who has prided himself on avoiding dishonorable tactics feels as though he must resort to them to stand a chance of winning or even just to get a bit of press coverage. Voters need to stop rewarding destructive attacks and encourage candidates to return to the productive policy-based optimism of the Reagan era.