Embrace the Mud

After reading the recent political op-eds discussing the 2012 election, it has become clear: this election is shaping up to be a nasty one. You can expect severe mudslinging by all sides and a dearth of quotable lines on policy to help navigate America through its current sea of woes. New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, has even gone so far as to call this particular election “craven.” And who can blame him? Already during this election, we have seen the Candidates fire verbal torpedoes at each other armed with accusations of infidelity, shaky convictions on controversial issues, and irresponsible out-of-the-box thinking (I’m looking at you Ron Paul). When watching this war of words, I find myself becoming reminiscent of the good ol’ days when politicians ran on the issues and chose to leave the mud on the ground, where it belongs.  Do you remember those days? Anybody?

Move over baseball and warm apple pie, the art of mudslinging and character bashing in political elections may just be the oldest American past time. When you take away the election of 1789, when George Washington ran unopposed for president, almost every Presidential election in this country has proven to be a bastion of personal attacks and ad hominems. One could even argue that the mudslinging of today has lost its edge when compared to the great verbal assaults of our founding fathers.  

Here are a few of my favorites:

In the 1829 election of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, supporters of Adams declared that Jackson was the illegitimate son of a mullato farther who met Jackson’s mother while she was working as a prostitute.  The Jackson camp later returned fire by declaring that Adams had a “hermaphrodiacal” character, in that it was impossible to deduce if his behavior was masculine or feminine.

James Polk accused Henry Clay of frequently visiting whorehouses and consistently breaking all 10 commandments during the 1844 presidential election. How Clay broke these commandments exactly is still a mystery as Polk refused to go into detail for fear it would emotionally scar the American people.

During the autumn of 1864, supporters of presidential candidate George McLellan accused Abraham Lincoln of devising a plan to force white and black people to breed. McLellan supporters railed that Lincoln believed this would strengthen the American society, recently enervated by the civil war.

Bruni is correct in stating that this election will be craven: our history has shown us that all we know how to be during elections is craven. If anything, our history shows that this dirty technique is very effective. By ‘swift-boating’ John Kerry in 2004, George W. Bush got a considerable bump in the polls that helped carry him to re-election. When Barry Goldwater was gaining traction in the 1964 election, Lyndon B. Johnson  helped seal his victory by running a commercial showing a nuclear bomb detonate as a little girl picked the peddles off of a flower, insinuating that by electing Goldwater, you would be literally obliterated. The list of examples is endless.  

The real question is; why is mudslinging so effective? I posit it’s because to ask political candidates to stop mudslinging, we are really asking ourselves to stop craving scandal. For candidates, mudslinging is the best way to keep voters’ attention. Let’s face it, understanding how the 2012 presidential candidates will handle vital issues such as the collapse of the Doha round, or what sanctions/incentives he/she will use to calm strained cotton trade deals with South America is not exciting to most. However, watching educated adults caustically attack each other’s character can be quite entertaining; no matter how ill-suited it is during a presidential election. Until the voters of this nation decide they are tired of the mud caked election process, it will keep coming. That is, until voters are prepared to make the election process less exciting and accept that we are electing a commander-in-chief and not the character bashing king, we are only asking candidates to stay away from discussing complicated policy points.

Gauging from America’s historical record of having a substantial appetite for mudslinging, I do not foresee a clean election this year. I will just keep reminding myself that no matter how thick the air gets with mud, we can assume our candidates won’t be accusing their opponent’s mothers of being prostitutes as John Adams did. That’s an improvement, right? And it is because of that improvement, I will keep my hope of having a clean election sometime in the distant future. As for this year, I will brace myself for one hell of a craven election.    

Thoughts?