Is John McCain’s campaign the most despicable in modern history? Or is he just calling plays from the standard “losing Republican” playbook? Do the minor outrages and insults of previous campaigns fade too quickly into the past to be remembered (e.g. which Obama advisor called Clinton a “monster”? Did Clinton play the race card in South Carolina? Does anyone care?) ? Or do the McCain-Palin accusations of terrorism, disloyalty, and treason represent a new and contemptible low?

Bush’s 2000 general election campaign, in which a genial but obviously overwhelmed governor ran as a moderate Democrat, was only revealed to be untrue in retrospect, when he turned out to be the most right-wing president since Herbert Hoover. But at the time, it was mostly about expanding access to education, cutting taxes for the middle class, and conducting a humble foreign policy. I don’t remember anything resembling the mindless, pointless name-calling of the McCain campaign.

And although Bush’s 2004 campaign was heavy on character assassination, it was also a campaign about ideas. Wrong-headed ideas, to be sure — the war in Iraq is a good idea, suspected terrorists shouldn’t have any rights, our allies can go to hell — but ideas, nonetheless. The lies about John Kerry were at least designed to reinforce the argument that John Kerry couldn’t be counted on to start wars, torture prisoners, and tell our allies to go to hell.

John McCain, by contrast, has zero ideas to talk about. Barack Obama seems to know more about McCain’s health care plan than John McCain does. The only thing left is John McCain’s anger at seeing a presidency he thinks he’s entitled to (it’s his turn!) slip away. He and Sarah Palin are eagerly funneling that anger into the conservative id and turning it into general, unfocused rage about Obama, about the media, about liberals, about education, about pronouncing words correctly, and so on.

My initial reaction was to consider the McCain campaign uniquely ugly — I’ve never before heard presidential candidates doing call-and-response and encouraging their supporters to yell things like “terrorist!”, “kill him!”, and “off with his head!”

But then I saw that Tim Fernholz at TAPPED found a strangely familiar New Republic article about the last days of a flailing, bitter Dole campaign that was headed towards defeat:

Mainly what is noticeable to the naked eye is how much less pleasant the Dole campaign has become — which is saying something. The crowds flip the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say, “Yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You.” The artillery aimed at Clinton gets heavier by the hour. ” [...]

[F]rom the beginning the Dole people have preferred to insult your intelligence than to craft more plausible lies. The disjuncture between the persona of the candidate (straight talker) and the behavior of his campaign (big liars) dates back to the very start of the primaries. At the same time that Dole was presenting himself as a force for decency his campaign was spending millions of dollars on push polls. When asked about them, the Dole campaign told reporters that Forbes and Buchanan were hiring pollsters to slander themselves, so that they could accuse the Dole campaign of dirty tactics. They kept this up for several weeks, even after they were told to stop by the Republican National Committee. Dole’s attitude seems to have been: whatever these people I’ve hired do in my name is not my responsibility. He never seems to have realized there’s a problem with selling honesty dishonestly.

I’m not sure if this makes the McCain campaign look better, or the Republican Party in general look worse, but there you have it.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 9:17 am, 10 October 2008 and filed under 2008 Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.