Is McCain's campaign the worst ever? Josh Marshall takes a shot.
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Are They All As Sleazy As McCain?
Either because of age or recent immersion in politics, a lot of readers have asked, is it really usually this bad? Do they all get this sleazy? As sleazy as McCain?
The simple answer, I think, is, No. They don't. I don't think there's any question that McCain's is the dirtiest and most dishonest campaign, certainly in the last 35 years and possibly going much further back into the early 20th century.
You may say, wait, Willie Horton? The Swift-boat smears? What about those?
But here's the key point, one that is getting too little attention. President Bush's father didn't run the Willie Horton ad. And this President Bush, however much they may have been funded by his supporters and run with Karl Rove's tacit approval, didn't run the Swift Boat ads. These were run by independent groups. Just how 'independent' we think they really are is a decent question. But even the sleaziest campaigns usually draw the line at the kind of sleaze they are wiling to run themselves under their own name.
In this case, though, the kind of toxic sludge usually run by one-off independent groups in very limited ad buys makes up virtually all of McCain's presence on TV.
Even setting aside this distinction, McCain's campaign has charted new territory in deliberate lying and appeals to racism and xenophobia. But this distinction itself is too little recognized.
Late Update: One reader points to Richard Nixon's campaigns as the obvious competitor for McCain in the sleaziest of all time derby. And this is why I flagged the "in the last 35 years" caveat. But let's break this down. The best argument here would be to compare McCain's terrorist-baiting to Nixon's red-baiting. And it's not a bad comparison. But this was much more a matter of the Nixon of the 1950s. That didn't figure in the 1960 campaign. And red-baiting per se, at least of the 1950s variety, wasn't Nixon's pitch in the 1968 or 1972 elections, but rather a more general stab-in-the-back, take the country back for the real Americans from the anti-American hippie freaks. Now, there's a separate question of whether Nixon outdid McCain in the category of illegality and dirty tricks in the 1968 and 1972 campaigns. And at least on the basis of what's publicly known at the moment, there seems little doubt that Nixon wins in that category. Regardless, McCain's in excellent company. And I'd stick to my claim that McCain likely outdoes Nixon on things that happened in presidential campaigns.
--Josh Marshall
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