Can The Candidates Stay Out of the Gutter?

It’s one of the biggest contradictions of politics: voters say they are turned off by negative attacks during an election, but at the same time, the negative approach seems to work. So candidates continue doing it.

Consider the final days of the Pennsylvania primary and the two Democratic candidates. Sen. Clinton has been running a negative campaign for some time, since at least the run-up to the Ohio and Texas primaries, where she began the “kitchen sink” campaign; a desperate effort to drive up doubts about Sen. Obama’s readiness to be President, and present herself as the experienced alternative.

It has worked, to some extent, with the voters Clinton has needed in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Obama, while presenting himself as a different kind of candidate who takes the higher road, has nonetheless also gone negative against Clinton, bringing into question whether he really can transcend the “typical politics” that he says leads to gridlock.

As if taking its cue from the candidates, ABC moderators at the final debate (and I suspect it will be the final one, there really is very little reason for Obama to agree to another one) spent most of their time addressing questions of flag pins and past associations and miscues. Perhaps there is a place in a debate for talking about such things, but even if you concede that (and I’m not sure we should) does it really make sense for these topics to dominate a debate at the expense of more substantive issues?

Yet the ABC debate was the one with the highest ratings of any during the campaign.

So will cynicism win out? Will Obama’s call to change the tone and approach to American politics turn out to be a noble but lost cause?

I think it will be very difficult for candidates to avoid the negative, “politics as usual” as long as the media stands to profit so much, in every sense of the word, from the status quo. Think about how much money media outlets have gained because of this protracted campaign. Both Democratic candidates are raising huge sums of money and forking it right over to pay for TV and radio ads. And money aside, the media gets to continue be stars and star-makers as long as so much heat is being generated by the campaigns. Why should the media want a change in the tenor of this race?

So expect more distractions and manufactured outrage. Until reformers like Obama can really convince the public that this stuff is not worth their time, politicians will continue to have to deal with it, and some will embrace it. The good news is that at least Obama is talking about change, and that's a first step.

As for Pennsylvania, Obama at this point is simply trying to keep the Clinton victory from being a blowout. And then he should win in North Carolina and maybe Indiana. I don’t see Clinton getting the nomination at this point. But she can continue to make things very tough for Obama. And Obama, although he has kept his head and continued to move forward with his campaign, has not been without mistakes.

What does this mean for the fall? Can Obama survive the inevitable attempts at Swiftboating by Republican operatives? There’s a very real chance that Clinton has done him a favor by letting him get pummeled on some of these issues now, when there’s plenty of time to recover. As unpleasant as it all has been, I think it’s a valid argument that it may be better to get this stuff aired out now rather than in the fall. (By this stuff I mean stuff like Rev. Wright, not the flag pin issue, which simply shouldn’t be an issue at all.)

But I think that although we’ll see plenty of negative stuff in the fall, there’s going to be a very different dynamic in a McCain vs. Obama campaign, compared with the Clinton vs. Obama tussle that we’re seeing now. The fact is, there is so little difference in policy when it comes to Clinton and Obama. Clinton has had to embrace these other petty issues because she really can’t attack him much on the more important issues. They agree on those, and where there are differences (health care) the arguments are so technical and wonkish that people just lose interest.

With McCain, Obama is going to be able to really focus on issues and differences of political philosophy, and make his case for change. And McCain will be able to make his case for things staying more or less the same. And here’s what I think. I think the voting public will see the “Obama is a secret Muslim who hates the flag and wants to take your guns and give us socialized medicine and doesn’t drink the same kind of coffee you do” messages as the contemptible lies that they are. And they’re going to vote for what they want. Which is something different.


Prediction: Clinton – 56 percent; Obama – 44 percent.