In Pursuit of a Higher Negativism

A funny thing happened on the way to the second presidential debate between President Bill Clinton and Republican nominee Bob Dole.

For 30 years citizens and opinion-makers alike have complained about negative campaigning in presidential politics. There’s too much name-calling, we sniff, and too little attention to policy. Then came the 1996 race, featuring a White House whose many scandals fairly begged for negative attention. For two wheel-spinning months, Dole’s tongue was tied on the subject because of fear that raising the character issue would antagonize voters who are repelled by negative campaigns.

By the eve of Wednesday’s debate, commentators--not just Dole advocates--were rooting for the senator to go negative. They wanted him to pursue, finally, the question of the Clinton administration’s ethics.

Dole, spurred by a sinking campaign, gave it a try. But the anxiety about being “too negative” lingered, eroding the power of his arguments. Ironically, it is not at all clear that American voters, as a general rule, shrink from negative campaigns. It is more likely that recent years have given negative campaigning a bad name.

If we remember past presidential campaigns, we tend to recall them as more dignified than ours, more attentive to policy. Not so. In the country’s beginning, people thought that qualifications for office were essentially a matter of character--chiefly, public character, revealed by an individual’s reputation, but, sometimes, by private character as well.

As one mark of character, candidates of that time were supposed to sit silent while voters made up their minds, rather than running all over the jurisdiction opining on hot electoral issues. So candidates did not trade ethics charges directly. (They were, however, allowed to buy the voters a drink on Election Day; our forefathers were not crazy.) But their campaigns compensated, calling each other’s candidates things like “atheist,” “swindler” and “traitor.” In the mid-19th century, when Henry Clay ran for president, his opponents made a point of his drinking, gambling and foul mouth.

Searching out the other guy’s ethical lapses was an inherent part of the process, and voters do not seem to have penalized one side or other for such negative campaigning.

Toward the end of the 19th century, a candidate’s silence in the face of character charges started to be taken as evidence of guilt. In 1884, when voters elected Grover Cleveland president despite the story of his illegitimate son, they did so not because they were indifferent but because Cleveland was so forthright in dealing with the accusation. The tradition of the candid or seemingly candid answer to a character charge took root in presidential campaigns. Responding to one stinging attack, Franklin D. Roosevelt immortalized his “little dog, Fala.” Richard M. Nixon gave his “Checkers” speech. The electorate took this development, too, in stride.

In 1964, during the campaign against Barry W. Goldwater, Democrats aired their famous TV commercial with the picture of a little girl picking flowers, followed by an image of an exploding nuclear mushroom cloud. Partly, it was the increasing use of television in campaigns that made the charges and countercharges more obnoxious to voters by making them more vivid.

More important, though, the subject of character began to seem wearying because the universe of “moral” or “ethics” charges began to expand even more rapidly than the mushroom cloud did. Prevailing ideology allowed sexual misconduct to become a central part of the character issue, and charges proliferated. Fascination with sexual misconduct became a more specific fascination with sexual coercion, and the charges grew uglier.

When it came to more properly public ethics, rules proliferated after Watergate. More rules led to more violations, more evasion and more convoluted acts of malfeasance. The sometime titillation of a good scandal, campaign or otherwise, became a sea of muck pervading all of politics.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Republicans and Democrats swam in this environment by seeing which party could dig faster to unearth scandals in the other camp. But it was not until the inspired presidency of Clinton that we saw another major paradigm shift.

Clinton’s people perfected the politics of deflection. They have consistently used voter weariness with negative politics as a shield against all types of ethics questions, from the high personal--as with Paula Jones--to the highly public--as with the issue of unnecessary White House possession of hundreds of personal FBI files.

The White House developed successful formulas for interrupting the line of questioning in such matters: That’s old stuff. There’s nothing new here. Those allegations have been investigated. That’s too low to dignify with a response. Let’s make this a campaign of issues, not insults.

During last week’s debate, Dole finally broke free of these constraints. He drew a distinction between private ethics and public ethics and went for the latter. He mentioned the FBI files, the Indonesian contributions to Clinton’s campaigning, the Whitewater pardons and the broader question about whether this president tells the truth.

Yet, even in the debate, Dole raised these topics in a tangential way--briefly, as part of another response, or without making his point directly. This glancing manner was a product partly of the town-hall format and partly of Dole’s speaking style. But it also seemed incongruous, because no one seems to know how to talk about public character any more outside a 30-second attack spot, or to speak of it unself-consciously.

Clinton, responding to Dole’s charges, deflected them yet again; and, because he is the more accomplished speaker, his responses sounded far more integral to his answers. Again, he took the old high ground: “I hope we can talk about what we’re going to do in the future. No attack ever created a job or educated a child or helped a family make ends meet. No insult ever cleaned up a toxic waste dump or helped an elderly person.”

That’s not true, of course. When egregious corruption is cleaned up, government programs work better. Children can not be educated as citizens unless politics is worthy of respect. Clinton’s formulation entirely omits the importance of public goals, such as curbing abuses of government power.

But Clinton did nothing more than exploit a systemic weakness. The moral coin of the character issue has been debased by overextension and overuse--so much so that many decent people can not stand to hear about it and do not know how to talk about it. The next job is for someone to come along and restore the character issue to its legitimate place in politics--to give us not the end of negative campaigning but a new, improved, up-to-date version of the product.