Ask Not If It’s Negative, but If It’s Honest : Campaigns: The sin is not in pointing out failings of the opposition. The sin is in using little glimmers of fact to create a deceptive impression.

“It was . . . Richard Nixon’s toughest commercial of the campaign.” That’s the 1968 presidential campaign, where Roger Ailes got his start, as immortalized in Joe McGinnis’ book, “The Selling of the President.” The ad was a montage of riot and war scenes interspersed with a laughing photo of Hubert H. Humphrey. It was pulled after complaints that it suggested Humphrey was laughing at American soldiers.

Twenty years of Gresham’s Law--the bad politics driving out the good--brought us to last year’s George Bush campaign. That is now the standard for political campaigns at every level. Of this year’s three big races--for governor of New Jersey and Virginia and mayor of New York--the one in which the Democrat is surest of victory is New Jersey, where Jim Florio Bushed first with a ludicrous commercial about how the Republican, Jim Courter, keeps toxic waste in his back yard. (Several drums of unused heating oil were left on some property Courter co-owned with his brother.)

However, all the tut-tutting about “negative campaigning” is a bit imprecise. There is nothing wrong with pointing out the failings of the opposition. Furthermore, the insistence that only “the issues” matter--that we should be talking about the future of our schools, not about my five past drunk driving convictions--is a tiresome conceit. Personal history illumines character, and character is a valid “issue.”

Nor is there anything wrong with dwelling on past views an opponent has abandoned. All three Democrats are having a good time with extreme anti-abortion positions their Republican rivals held as recently as a few months ago but now disown. At least in the case of New York’s Rudolph Giuliani and Virginia’s Marshall Coleman, the man’s more moderate current position is undoubtedly closer to his genuine beliefs. But there is nothing wrong with nailing them to the cross of past demagoguery. And “flip-flops” are a valid issue in themselves, raising the question whether a candidate genuinely believes in anything at all.

So what is wrong with today’s negative campaigning? The basic standard should be honesty. If a campaign thrust is honest, the voters can weigh its merits. But honesty is not just literal accuracy.

Much of the stuff being put forward as campaign issues, while literally true, is basically deceptive. Courter is running an ad saying, “Ten times Florio has taken campaign money from a corrupt union linked to organized crime.” That’s true, except that the contributions (all of $5,900) were made before the union was under investigation and after it had been taken over by the Feds.

Second, some campaign accusations, while accurate, are trivial, like Courter’s drums of heating oil or building code violations in a house Douglas Wilder once owned in Richmond. The dishonesty here lies in implying that these things matter, when you know they don’t.

Even accurate assertions become dishonest through a kind of campaign shorthand. The classic example is Bush’s use of Michael Dukakis’ court-approved decision to veto as unconstitutional a bill requiring teachers to recite the Pledge of Allegiance against their will. This became “Dukakis’ veto of the Pledge of Allegiance.” Republicans happily promoted this deceptive elision, but inevitably it was taken up by the press, too, out of a non-malicious need for compression.

Even in the relatively expansive precincts of a column, it is hard to tell the whole story of Florio’s appearance as a character witness on behalf of an employee involved in a fatal car accident, but “interfering in the judicial process” on behalf of an accused killer--which is how Courter’s ad puts it--is pretty unfair. Wilder’s ethical lapse as a lawyer 11 years ago (he missed a filing deadline for a client) may be relevant, but the way Coleman’s commercial zooms in on some boilerplate language in the official reprimand (“PROTECT THE PUBLIC”) implies that Wilder is a marauding Ted Bundy of the legal profession.

And there ought to be a statute of limitations on flip-flops. Coleman’s latest ad is a staged mini-melodrama based on Wilder’s support--in 1972--for a bill that would allow cross-examination of rape victims about their sexual history. That bill went nowhere and Wilder later (in 1976) supported a bill doing exactly the opposite. The ad omits all that. Wilder is not attempting a cynical “repositioning” on the question of rape, as other candidates are doing on abortion.

Finally, there is the question of proportionality. The lie is in the emphasis given to matters that may not be trivial but are hardly worth making the centerpiece of a campaign. This fundamental deception is a feature of all three major campaigns this year. Once again Bush is to blame, with his flags ‘n’ furloughs festival last year. It will probably take a war to get American politics back up to the high level of Richard Nixon and Roger Ailes in 1968.