Every campaign that I can remember has been about bringing the other person down more than telling why you are better for the job. This election is no different. Both sides are claiming that the other is running the more negative campaign. The problem is how do you know since negative is a subjective term in this case. So I decided to watch a sample of each of the candidates’ latest television ads.
I watched seventeen from McCain and seventeen from Obama. Now I had to use an objective ruling so I decided that for a campaign ad you can have one of two types, either pro-you or anti-other person. As I watched McCain I thought it was pretty bad. Only eight of McCain’s ads talked about why you should vote for him, the other nine just stated why you should not vote for Obama. This personally made me a bit angry. However, I had yet to watch Obama’s. As it turned out, Obama only had one message that told us why he was the better candidate. The other sixteen ads were attacks on McCain. So who is running the more negative campaign? I would have to say Obama.
The biggest problem with this sort of campaigning, apart from the vicious attacks, is that it turns us into a group who votes not because the one candidate is better, but instead we cast our ballots on the candidate that is the least bad. So what could the candidates do instead of the malicious ads? Why not tell us what you stand for instead of telling us why the other person is so bad. Simply state why should we vote for you instead of why we shouldn’t vote for the other. That way when you are elected people can say, “That is the best man for the job!” instead of the usual, “At least he is better than the alternative.”
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Although I appreciate the explanation of the system you devised to rate the ads and your genuine attempt at objectivity, I wonder where you obtained the 17 Obama ads and the 17 McCain ads? The reason I ask is because your results don’t jive with what the Science Daily, the Chicago Tribune, the Advertising Age magazine, or the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel concluded when they ran the numbers on the mounting negativity in the 2008 Presidential campaign ads.
Three of the above four sources found that McCain ran a higher percentage of negative ads than Obama. It seems that you were unintentionally subjected to some type of sampling bias, since by your tally Obama’s ads were 94% negative and, therefore, the most negative in our nation’s history. This cannot be correct. Even the single source that ranked Obama’s percentage of negative ads as higher than McCain’s totaled him at 68%. The numbers that I, personally, would like to see would be on a timeline. What percentage of which candidate’s ads was negative one year before Election Day? One month before Election Day? One week? I bet if these numbers were correlated with approval numbers in the polls, it would equate to blatant desperation. An example of this would be what The Wisconsin Advertising Project of the University of Wisconsin reported on Oct 8th, less than a month before Election Day – “The McCain campaign's decision to turn 100% of its advertising messages to negative attacks on Sen. Barack Obama last week -- combined with the 34% of Mr. Obama's messages attacking Sen. John McCain -- means that negative ads this time are outpacing those of four years ago in the race between President George W. Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.”
One thing that all studies agree on is that this was, cumulatively, the greatest use of negative campaigning in US presidential election history. I would like to believe these numbers are reflective of the sheer volume of money both candidates threw at advertising this year – more than $1 billion each. What I fear is that it may be reflective of the continuation of the Bush administration’s exceptionally effective tactic of public control – psychological warfare aimed at keeping Americans afraid. When any leadership can keep its constituency afraid of impending doom, no matter what this fabled doom is, they can effectively do anything they want. Once this type of warfare is in place, reason is trampled by rumor, conjecture, and (most recently) lies. If a citizen questions why the nation is invading a foreign land, the answer is, “You don’t want the terrorists to win, do you???” Dissenters are crucified on the cross of public scrutiny.
To be fair, this is not a new tactic and is not limited to the Bush administration. Orwell illustrated this concept very well in his [horror] story, 1984. Hitler used fear to rally Germans together and to him, against a common enemy – those supposedly different from themselves and continually working to bring about the downfall of Germany (the Jews). I don’t want to compare the Bush administration to the Nazis – it is the greatest extreme, the greatest evil to compare anything to. Do I believe that we, as Americans, have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people? Yes. Intentionally and unintentionally, we have devastated a population of poor people trying to eke out a meager living on the hard land they were born on. This is terrible, but not to the same degree as Hitler’s attempt towards focused annihilation of a race. Somehow I’ve strayed far from where I started when I began writing this reply. The tangent I turned down does, however, relate to the recent election. I think that the reason Obama’s message resounded with so many Americans was its turn from this fear. Hopefully, we’ll see a continuance of this message.
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