Evaluating the "Sleaziness" Factor
The caveat: the article didn’t mention what is beyond doubt the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history”—Richard Nixon’s 1972 effort. Whatever people think of John McCain’s tactics in 2008, nothing that’s come from the Arizonan’s campaign even remotely resembles Nixon’s dirty-tricks efforts against Edmund Muskie, or CREEP’s threatening IRS audits to extort six-figure campaign contributions, or the Watergate burglary—an attempt to install listening devices in the headquarters of the opposition party.
And McCain’s cynicism doesn’t hold a candle to that demonstrated by Nixon in the clip below, which occurred the day after the filing of the case that eventually became Millikin v. Bradley. Nixon and aide Pat Buchanan discuss how to exploit the racial tensions associated with the Detroit busing controversy to weaken Muskie’s political standing, with Nixon actually making Buchanan look idealistic by comparison.
Beyond 1972, however, the arguments presented by scholarly in the article seem dubious. Vanderbilt University political science professor John Geer said that “McCain's tactics are no different than what we've seen in recent years. Presidential campaigns in the past few decades were worse in many ways.” He cited in particular LBJ’s 1964 campaign, with both the daisy ad and a harsh ad attacking Barry Goldwater on nuclear fallout.
Whenever I show the daisy ad in class, students are taken aback by its . . . lack of subtlety. That said, the ad itself was anything but a reckless distortion of Goldwater’s remarks. Beginning in the primary campaign, the Arizona senator had repeatedly—and often cavalierly—publicly commented on the possibility of using nuclear weapons, whether of the “low-yield” variety in “defoliating” the Vietnam jungles or as a way of making U.S. intentions known to the “men’s room” of the Kremlin. Democratic polling showed that swing voters had not only noticed these remarks (as well as Goldwater’s high-profile vote against the 1963 Limited Test-Ban Treaty) but were very much concerned by them. This condition, after all, explained why the daisy ad was so effective, even though it only appeared once and its script never mentioned Goldwater’s name.
There were, certainly, elements of sleaze in the 1964 campaign—LBJ’s efforts to block GOP investigations of the Bobby Baker and Walter Jenkins affairs, Goldwater’s use of the crime issue as a coded anti-black message. (Unclear is whether the GOP 1964 race-based efforts were sleazier than the 2008 Republicans running an ad showing a smiling [leering?] Obama, white children, and the false claim that Obama favored teaching kindergarten students about sex before they could read.) In any event, having read just about all of both candidate’s speeches for my forthcoming book on the campaign, I can’t think of any instances in which either LBJ or Goldwater issued—or, even more problematically, repeated—the kind of flat-out falsehoods that we’ve seen in recent weeks from McCain or Sarah Palin.
David Greenberg, meanwhile, told Politico, “There's nothing at all to rival the Swift-boating of Kerry in 2004, the imputations of un-Americanness to Dukakis in 1988, the anti-Catholic stuff against Al Smith in 1928 and the regular resort to slander and character assassination of so many 19th-century campaigns.” I consider the New Deal as the beginning of “modern presidential campaign history,” and so while I fully agree with Greenberg that lots of 19th-century campaigns were sleazier than what we’ve seen from McCain, it’s not really relevant to Axelrod’s comment. As to Greenberg’s assertion that “there's nothing at all to rival . . . the imputations of un-Americanness to Dukakis in 1988,” I’m not sure what campaign he’s been observing: from McCain’s first general election ad (an “American president Americans have been waiting for”) to his oft-stated claim that Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election, the GOP effort has been far more aggressive in attacking Obama’s “un-Americannness” than what Dukakis experienced in 1988.
Julian Zelizer correctly points out to Politico that “taking one quote and blowing it out of context is commonplace. That’s what you do in a campaign.” Indeed, we’ve seen this from both sides in 2008—Democrats with McCain’s 100-year assertion about U.S. troops in Iraq, Republicans (and Hillary Clinton) with Obama’s “bitter” comments. That said, Ruth Marcus’s column in today’s Washington Post echoes recent remarks from Mark Halperin on CNN as to how the distortions and outright falsehoods from the McCain team are of a different magnitude and type than almost anything we’ve seen from Obama.
Moreover, the “lipstick-on-a-pig” quote mentioned in the Politico piece really didn’t constitute “taking one quote and blowing it out of context.” No one—eventually, several days later, seemingly including McCain—believed that Obama’s comment referred to Palin. In this respect, the affair wasn't blowing a quote out of context but rather inventing a wholly false context for a quote.
It seems to me that the McCain/Palin campaign represents a logical, if unfortunate, evolution of a shift in U.S. politics begun around two decades ago by Newt Gingrich and his advisors; amplified by Bill Clinton and aides such as James Carville and Dick Morris; and then mastered by George Bush and Karl Rove. The use of spin and poll-tested catch phrases has increasingly debased political rhetoric, with politicians speaking in what amounts to a kind of code. The willingness to eschew this kind of politics is, in many ways, what initially made McCain and Obama so appealing.
Whatever their faults, however, the Gingrich/Clinton/Bush campaigns tended to avoid out-and-out falsehoods—if only, perhaps, because they feared the political blowback from lying. In the last several weeks, the McCain/Palin campaign doesn’t appear to have shared this concern. If politicians of both parties have succeeded in using words to advance outcomes divorced from their apparent meaning (the “Freedom to Farm Act” as a bill to massively cut farm subsidies; Clinton’s varying what the definition of “‘is’ is”), why not, the McCain campaign seems to have decided, simply make up facts to achieve the desired outcome? This site from the DNC is, obviously, partisan, but it contains links to mostly non-partisan sources, including four-Pinocchio awards for both McCain and Palin regarding recent false assertions—McCain about Palin and earmarks; Palin about Alaska’s energy production.
Maybe the McCain/Palin cavalier attitude toward the truth doesn’t constitute excessive or unusual sleaziness to some presidential historians. But it does seem to be a quite different approach than anything we’ve seen from a major-party campaign since Nixon in 1972.