Attack Politics : Running To Win On the Low Road

American politics is getting weird. In Texas, a candidate for Tarrant County (Fort Worth) judge died of a heart attack in January, too late to have his name removed from the March primary ballot. His opponent did what he called the “morally decent thing” and refused to campaign against a dead man. He lost.

Texans also nominated Warren G. Harding Jr. for state comptroller, Buster Brown for attorney general and Gene Kelly--who spent little money and had no visible campaign--for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Kelly’s opponent, an Appeals Court judge who spent more than $300,000 on his campaign, remarked afterward, “If I had been Fred Astaire, I might have won.”

Perhaps the strangest outcome occurred in the race for Harris County (Houston) Democratic Party chairman. Two candidates qualified for the runoff. One is Kenneth Bentsen Jr., an investment banker and nephew of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.), the 1988 Democratic nominee for vice president of the United States. The other is Leslie Elaine Perez, a transsexual and convicted murderer who spent seven years in prison--as a man--and was once on death row.

In the March 13 primary, Perez did well enough among gay and Latino voters to qualify for the runoff. She could become the first killer transsexual to hold a major party office. “Leslie is a Democrat working in the party,” the current county chairman said. “She’s not a joke.”

Maybe not, but a lot of people think American politics is becoming a joke. And a pretty nasty one at that.

Even the hardened voters of Texas were shocked by the mean-spiritedness of this year’s campaign. Democratic candidates for governor tried to outdo each other proclaiming devotion to the death penalty. One ran a TV commercial that showed him strolling in front of gigantic mug shots of criminals executed while he was governor.

Another candidate refused to answer the question of whether she had ever used illegal drugs. Instead, she ran ads saying her opponents had “the worst resumes money can buy.”

A candidate in a state senate race accused his opponent of murder because his law firm had defended a nursing home that was sued for negligence. The TV ad showed a patient’s tombstone.

In another race, a state senator was called a “political prostitute” for insurance companies and accused of beating his wife, underpaying child support, living in sin with a woman and stealing money from the Little League. His opponent’s TV ads showed a little boy in a baseball uniform pleading, “Senator, why did you take our money?”

Nice, huh? Well, the problem isn’t confined to Texas.

In the Iowa Senate race, the GOP candidate called the Democrat “a hypocrite . . . out of touch with Iowans because he chooses to live in Virginia and the Bahamas.” The Republican, who said he vacationed in his home town of Dubuque, displayed a map showing the location of the Democrat’s vacation home in the Bahamas.

At a campaign rally in Chicago, Rep. Gus Savage (D-Ill.) complained about “pro-Israel money” coming into his inner-city district and publicly singled out contributors with Jewish names who had given money to his opponent. Savage, who was rebuked this year by the House Ethics Committee for making sexual advances to a Peace Corps worker in Africa, said his March 20 primary victory represented a defeat for Chicago’s “white racist press” and the “suburban Zionist lobby.”

In the California gubernatorial race, former San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein’s new television spot cites the brutal smear campaign Richard M. Nixon waged against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950. But then Feinstein justified the ad as a lesson in history and and insisted it “is not a comparison” between Nixon and state Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, who is running against her.

Why has U.S. politics become so debased? Television is often blamed. True, negativism and triviality have been features of U.S. political life for more than 200 years, long before the advent of television. They didn’t have television in 1800, when a campaign leaflet asked, “Can serious and reflecting men look about them and doubt that if (Thomas) Jefferson is elected . . . those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin--which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence--defend our property from plunder and devastation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will not be trampled upon and exploded?”

They didn’t have television in 1884, when Republican candidate James G. Blaine was ridiculed as a “continental liar from the state of Maine” and the GOP returned fire by making an issue of Democrat Grover Cleveland’s sex life.

But television has made a difference. It has made negative campaigning more efficient. According to Jan van Lohuizen of Market Opinion Research, it is easier for voters to decide who to eliminate than who to support. “It’s easier to use negative information to get people to say, ‘I can’t vote for A,’ than to persuade them to say ‘I really like B,’ ” Van Lohuizen said.

Television is expensive and candidates have limited resources. They need to get the most bang for their bucks. Since negative ads have the strongest impact, that’s what they run first. They run positive ads only if they can afford to.

For many years, politicians were afraid to go negative on TV. Television commercials were too conspicuous and too risky. An exception was the famous “daisy ad” used by Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 campaign. That commercial, suggesting that Barry M. Goldwater might blow up the world, was broadcast once. It electrified the campaign.

The real breakthrough came in 1980, when the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NICPAC) ran tough negative ads against liberal Democratic senators, most of whom were defeated. It was not clear that the NICPAC ads made the difference--all GOP candidates did well in 1980. But the experience demonstrated negative campaigning was not necessarily dangerous.

It was the 1988 Bush campaign that proved how far you could go with a negative campaign: to the White House.

Democrats also learned a lesson from the 1988 campaign. You have to fight back. Indeed, candidates are not just fighting back. They are staging preemptive strikes. If a candidate suspects his opponent is likely to go negative, he goes negative first.

Of course there is a price. It breeds deep cynicism in the electorate. But that’s not really a problem for politicians. They don’t care how many people vote. They only care about getting more votes than the other guy. As one consultant put it, “In product advertising, if some people get so turned off by the ad that they don’t come into the store, everybody loses. It’s not that way with politics.”

But there are also substantial reasons for the trivializing of U.S. politics. Political debate has become stalemated on two issues--taxes and values. The Democrats got Mondaled on the tax issue in 1984. Then they got Dukakised on values in 1988.

The anti-tax consensus has ruled U.S. politics for 12 years. It started with Proposition 13 in California in 1978 and culminated in George Bush’s “read my lips--no new taxes” campaign in 1988. Candidates find it difficult to talk about moving the nation’s agenda forward as long as there are no resources available.

The evidence suggests that the tax revolt is still alive. In last month’s Illinois primary, angry suburban taxpayers threw veteran Republicans out of office. They also threw a scare into Jim Edgar, the GOP candidate for governor, who favors a permanent increase in the state income tax. Edgar lost one-third of the primary vote to an obscure anti-tax conservative.

Two weeks ago, Gov. William A. O’Neill of Connecticut, a Democrat, announced he would not seek a third term. He saw his popularity collapse after he pushed through a $1-billion tax increase. “It would be a very, very difficult campaign,” O’Neill said. “I think it would have to be a negative campaign, and I’m not sure that at this point in my life I wanted to start competing in that type of operation.”

Politicians are keeping a close eye on California’s Proposition 111, a measure on the June primary ballot that would upgrade the state’s transportation system--and double the state’s gasoline tax. Virtually the entire California Establishment supports the measure. But its chances for passage are iffy.

Republicans claim to hold the advantage on “values” as well as taxes. The GOP has perfected the art of portraying Democrats as outside the mainstream on such issues as law and order, morality and patriotism. They did it to George McGovern in 1972, and they did it to Michael S. Dukakis in 1988.

In Michigan, for example, Republican Senate candidate Rep. Bill Schuette has made the death penalty his key issue against incumbent Democratic Sen. Carl Levin. “I have consistently supported the death penalty for drug traffickers and cop killers,” Schuette says. Schuette accuses Levin of “leading the fight against the death penalty” and says he is “out of step with the mainstream of Michigan.”

The death penalty is a “from Mars” issue. When voters hear that a politician opposes the death penalty, their response is, “This guy must be from Mars.” The only politicians who get away with opposing capital punishment are those who can explain their position in terms of deep-seated moral or religious convictions. New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo can do that. Few others can.

As a result, Democrats scramble to preempt the issue. In California, Feinstein ran a TV spot with the tag-line, “She’s the only Democrat for governor for the death penalty.” She shot up in the polls.

This year, Democrats finally have a values issue they can call their own--abortion. If Republicans hit you on the death penalty, Democrats say, hit them back on abortion. Anti-abortion candidates are on the defensive all over the country. It’s even worse if they try to modify their views. Then it becomes a character issue. Voters are suspicious of candidates who check to see which way the wind is blowing and then change their convictions.

In the end, here’s what politics is about these days: If the other side gets you on taxes, you get them on abortion. As for serious problems such as drug abuse, education and the environment, why not follow the President’s lead?

Bush doesn’t talk about a great society, or even a good society. He talks about a ‘kinder, gentler” nation and “a thousand points of light.” His answer to urgent domestic problems is, “Have a nice day.”

That is also Bush’s foreign policy. “You say you’ve overthrown a corrupt communist dictatorship? Wonderful! And have a nice day.”

Can anything be done about this trivialization of U.S. politics? For one thing, we can require broadcasters to give candidates and parties free TV time--enough so that they would be forced to talk about what they are for as well as what they are against.

Both national party chairmen support the idea of free TV time. It is a common practice in other countries. So why not here? Because the broadcasting industry would yell bloody murder. You would be taking money out of network pockets by forcing them to give away air time for free.

The proper answer to that complaint is, “Tough noogies.” Broadcasters are licensed by the government to use the public airwaves. There is no reason why the government shouldn’t require stations to set aside a certain amount of free time for a legitimate public purpose. Anyway, why should broadcasters be getting rich off political campaigns?

Former Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox was once asked whether anything more could be done to improve his state’s prison system. “There’s not a lot more we can do,” the governor said, “unless we start getting a better class of prisoners.”

The same thing is true in politics. It’s hard to see how we can improve things unless we start getting a better quality of leadership. We need politicians who want to move the nation’s agenda forward. And who are willing to go beyond Bush’s patented political formula, “Campaign nasty, govern nice.”