The previous election we had mounted perhaps the best campaign we could, but with a young challenger, a relative unknown, the breakthrough we were hoping for was incredibly hard, if not impossible. With the electoral history, the demographical profiles and the polling numbers offering a hard, cold reality, the odds were stacked against us.

By the end there was little left to do but prepare the post mortem, and focus ourselves on the next fight.

About a year after the election, sitting around a board table we were preparing our strategy for the next time out when someone put the idea on the table. We need to go after our incumbent’s record, we need to find the controversial points and essentially put it in the worst possible light we could, we needed to paint her as being far distant from the mainstream of voters if we ever hoped to have any chance of beating her. Another person piped in, they would have no part in negative campaigning nor could the condone attack ads, it just didn’t seem right. It’s not an attack ad, it’s a truth ad, would be the defense, and anyways, for the past however man elections we have watched as they condemned us for using smear tactics that never came and proceeded to attack us using whatever they could to do it, if we are going to take the hit perhaps it should be for something we actually did do, not necessarily what it is perceived that we might do.

Ultimately it was decided against taking that road but amidst that it’s easy to see where people find it a simple thing to justify specific tactics and specific methods in order to win.

Without a doubt, politics in the last 50 years have changed. None of that is to say that negative campaigning or attack campaigns are anything new amidst the grand scope of the electoral battles that are waged. To realize that one has to just consider the campaigns waged by one time friends turned bitter political adversaries Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. As Adams’ campaign accused the Democratic-Republicans of being willing to murder their opponents, destroy churches and take the country down the road of the French Revolution, Jefferson’s campaign launched their own attacks against the Federalists, saying they would destroy the republican model of government and create a new American Aristocracy based on the British model of government.

They were brutal for their time and for the day, but, in many senses, they were tame by our standards today.

In 1960 something started to change. The onset of new media and new technology had essentially revolutionized the political campaign. During the historic election of Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon television began to play a prominent part. After watching the first televised national debate, it had to dawn on political strategists that this would be a potential means to be able to revolutionize negative campaigning, with an unprecedented power to cast your opponent in a poor light. In that first debate, Nixon, just out of the hospital, his weight down, no make up, tired and worn, paled in comparison to the fresh faced young Senator who stood across from him and the Vice President took a hit in the polls for it. Even with three more televised debates Nixon would not recover from the perception of the first. Though many of the commentators and political analysts watching would find themselves deploring the onset of the television age in politics for what they saw as a more shallow nature, a page was being turned.

Four years later, in the next election, would come a turning point in politics.

On September 7th, two months before voting day, the campaign of President Lyndon B. Johnson would release an ad; they would play it once and pull it immediately. Under the simple name of Daisy, the commercial was controversial to say the very least, using the specter of nuclear war and destruction as a political tool in order to discredit the campaign of Arizona Senator and Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. Largely unknown by voters, the ad sought to paint the two term Senator as a war monger who could not be trusted with the nations security during the tense days of the Cold War, especially with the memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis only a few years now removed.

A mix of curiosity and apprehension gave the ad life even after it was pulled, played over and over in the nightly news segments and by political commentators. It would be the birth of the modern smear campaign and the modern attack ad.

Since then there has been a careful evolution of the negative campaign or the attack ad, whether it was former Vice President Walter “Fritz” Mondale’s 1984 ad against incumbent President Ronald Reagan imposing the images of war and missiles over that of children playing or the famous Willie Horton ad’s established for Vice President George Bush by then Republican National Chairman Lee Atwater as he fought the 1988 election against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and all the ads that would come between and after. It has been a game that both the Republican’s and the Democrats have worked on, honed and sought to perfect over the past 44 years.

Far gone are now the memories of campaigns like the famous Thomas Dewey challenge of President Harry S. Truman where it was hard, if not impossible to find a single reference to their opponent by either the New York Governor or the incumbent President, or the worthy adversary elections of Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson and General Dwight David Eisenhower.

It’s not a hard thing to justify attack ads or smear campaigns and somehow it always seems to masquerade the actual intent of it behind some nobler cause or some nobler ideal, but when it’s said and done you can't sugar coat it. But then as Dukakis’ 1988 pollster, Mark Mellman, showed to the Governor, polls indicated that people processed and retained negative information considerably more easily than they process positive information.

A few months ago, when it was becoming more apparent that Illinois Senator Barack Obama was going to win the Democratic Primary and as his principle rival, the one time front runner to the race, New York Senator Hillary, Newsweek published a story “Sit back, Relax, Get Ready to Rumble.” An article by Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe, the two journalists contended that “The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities…. It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as "the other"—as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.”

A few months later, while explaining his position change on the issue of public funding for his campaign, something that the Illinois Senator not only said he take but that he would champion, Senator Obama said “John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we’ve already seen that he’s not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations.” It would be an idea that he would elaborate on a short time later during a fundraising speech in Florida, where he would state “We know what kind of campaign they are going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid. They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young. He's inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And, did I mention he's black.”

Yet, to this day, the 527’s that Senator Obama mentioned in his message are noticeably absent from the campaign and the negative campaigning that he has mentioned, perhaps only occurred twice from a campaign event or media release, the first when Ohio Talk Radio Mainstay Bill Cunningham was quickly condemned by Senator McCain for the use of Senator Obama’s middle name three times in the course of a speech at a rally, the second when the national party put a stop to a release being put out by the Tennessee Republican Party using the Illinois Senator’s middle name. So careful are they not to embark on this road that when it was shown to the McCain campaign that, through their Google Ads, campaign advertisements were showing up on sits that did use negative campaigning against Senator Obama they quickly pulled them.

So then is the Obama campaign preemptively trying to dismiss tactics that will be used by the McCain campaign or is he launching his own attack campaign and smear messaging based on a perception that he is trying to build around the Arizona Senator?

While Senator Obama seeks to lay claim on the high road, the majority of the attacks have come from the Democrats, whether it was the recent comments mocking Senator McCain by General Wesley Clark, where the retired General said “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president” making reference to the events that would lead to McCain’s capture by the North Vietnamese and time as a Prisoner of War or West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller’s comments that he had to quickly apologize for. “McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Even Senator Obama’s claims of attacks that are yet to come constitute a smear campaign, essentially implying that those who would support Senator McCain over him would do so because they are afraid of people with “a funny name” or because they are racist, seeking to withhold the presidency from him not based on the issues or based on his record or based on his policies but on the sole basis of the color of his skin.

Much like President Lyndon Johnson’s Daisy Ad, Senator Obama puts the idea out there, and allows for the idea to be carried by the media, played and replayed ad nausem, even more than the 1964 campaign could have even imagined considering there were no 24 hour news cycles then and with that he builds a public perception around him and around his opponent, understanding full well the effects and the ramifications of his actions. But then why wouldn’t he? It’s a tactic that has been used time and time again, and, as any political strategist, even still green behind the ears, will tell you building perceptions is vital because often times in politics perception is reality.

The difference, rather then directly aiming a negative message towards Senator McCain or his campaign, they are trying to embed a negative message into his campaign, seeking to attribute it to him without him ever even utilize it, perhaps out of realization that there is an accuracy in the studies of MIT Political Science Professor Stephen Ansolabehere and his Stanford colleague Shanto Iyengar, a Professor of Political Campaigns and Mass Media. Ansolabehere and Iyengar’s studies show that voters are less likely to turn out to vote when a negative message is embedded into their mind.

By seeking to attribute the negative message with Senator McCain one then has to wonder if they are putting the idea out there in order to essentially cause his voters either to stay home or sway them to his side, all the while whilst trying not to fall into the trap of alienating or turning off his voters or lose his message that he is bringing a new sort of campaign forward.

Otherwise why else would one try to ingrain these thoughts without any proof or substantive evidence to put them forward?

But then just a few thoughts I suppose.