Do Republicans Play Rougher Politics?

John M. Broder, in the NYT (Sept. 12, 2004):

Do Republicans play a rougher game of politics than Democrats?

The question has been tossed around since Vice President Dick Cheney, in apparently unscripted remarks, suggested last week that electing the Democratic ticket in November would invite a devastating terrorist attack.

The Democrats cried foul, but of course there's no referee in politics. And neither party has a monopoly on ruthless, unscrupulous campaigning. It just seems that the Republicans are, today at least, more adept at the black art of attack politics, according to historians and flummoxed Democratic partisans.

"I don't think there's any question they're better at it than we are," said James Carville, the Democratic warrior-consultant who admitted to being envious of his Republican counterparts' merciless brand of campaigning. "But I'm fixing to do what I can to change that slightly."...

Lee Atwater, President George H. W. Bush's chief strategist in 1988, left the battlefield scattered with corpses, including that of the hapless Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina Congressional candidate in 1980 who had the misfortune of running against one of Mr. Atwater's clients. Mr. Atwater was accused of whispering to reporters that Mr. Turnipseed had undergone psychiatric treatment in college, and when Mr. Atwater was asked about it, he said he would not respond to allegations from someone who had been "hooked up to jumper cables."

In 1988, Mr. Atwater engineered the senior Mr. Bush's victory with unrelenting attacks on Michael Dukakis, including the advertisement featuring Willie Horton, the black convicted murderer who escaped on a weekend furlough and raped a white woman while Mr. Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts.

George W. Bush and his chief strategist, Karl Rove, learned the Republican rules of the game during that successful campaign, and perhaps learned even more in the elder Mr. Bush's loss in 1992 to a more agile and hungrier team of Democrats led by Bill Clinton.

Mr. Clinton and his rapid-response style of campaigning were a throwback to an era of more hard-nosed Democratic politicians. Lyndon Johnson was one of the dirtiest campaigners Texas ever produced. His House and Senate campaigns were legendary for their viciousness, and his presidential campaign advertisement against Barry Goldwater in 1964 of a girl plucking a daisy before a nuclear mushroom cloud makes Mr. Cheney's remarks this week sound like a reading of "The Pet Goat." John and Bobby Kennedy, with their mobster friends, their union muscle and their rum-running father, were hardly pushovers in the contact sport of electoral politics.

"Both parties think the other will stop at nothing, so they impute to their opponents their own worst tendencies and are quick to retaliate for some fancied grievance," said Lewis L. Gould, professor emeritus of American history at the University of Texas and author of "Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans," published last year.

"Politics ain't beanbag," Professor Gould said, citing the famous maxim of Mr. Dooley, the creation of the satirist Finley Peter Dunne. "But that said, the recent Democrats seem to lack an instinct for the jugular or are more burdened by scruple or believe in the old Progressive view that if you give the public the facts they'll see through the lies. Republicans have more of a sense that the public likes to be entertained and that issues are essentially dull. They play a harder brand of hardball."...