Can Negative Campaigning be Positive?

In-depth politics story
-- Aly Dixon

Unmistakably, the 2008 presidential election has had its ugly moments. Ad campaigns have bashed candidates, misrepresented facts, stirred up heated debates, and maybe even changed some voter’s minds. According to a Talking Points Memo, John McCain Campaign Ads during the month of October were nearly 100 percent devoted to attack ads. Also, according to the Wall Street Journal, upon the naming of Sarah Palin as the Vice President choice, Barack Obama assigned 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers to go into Alaska in search of “dirt” on Sarah Palin. However, is this really anything we the voters didn’t expect? This election is in many eyes the most important in history and just because it is so incredibly important doesn’t mean it is the only election to utilize the animosity of negative campaigning.

However, John Geer, professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University says, “Negative ads have more useful information than the positive ads by a number of different criteria. Negative ads tend to have facts in them, they tend to be more about issues than personal traits and they tend to be more specific when talking about these issues.”

Geer claims, “you’ve got to give a role for attacks and negativity in democracy, if you do away with it you do away with democracy so it goes hand in hand. Sometimes it makes us uncomfortable, and sometimes it goes too far, but you need it and we need a society especially among the news media to learn to appreciate that it actually has some benefits. If you’re going to buy a car you need to know the good and the bad. Do you want to buy a car with only the information with the car dealer? No, because they're only going to tell you one side of the story and candidates are going to do the same thing.”

James Seward, New York State Senator representing the Tompkins County area says that negative campaigning has not been a part of his campaign this year.

Don Barber, the democratic candidate running against Seward also acknowledges that negative campaigning has been kept at a minimum in their election. Barber says that he believes elections should definitely be more focused on issues rather than campaign smearing, especially with the current Presidential election.

Geer says “negative ads have the ability to advance your case but also hurt it if you go too far.” This was the case with McCain’s “sex education” ad, which is shown below.



Geer says, “that ad went too far and McCain got a lot of push back on it. I think it backfired on him because you could technically read the bill as suggesting sex education but that’s just silly, that wasn’t the case. It’s an example of when you go too far it doesn’t work for you.”

Another ad that Geer recognized as going too far was a 2006 ad run against Congressman Michael Arcuri, titled “bad call.”



“They used the fact that apparently somebody misdialed a number and called a phone sex line for five seconds using the taxpayers dollars. It was a disaster for the candidate to air that ad because it is not even close to the truth. If you go beyond what the evidence supports, negative campaigning backfires,” Geer says.

However, negative campaigning does do something that positive campaigning about yourself as a candidate doesn’t, it allows the other side to come out. Seward calls this “comparative campaigning.”

“When you compare records of service and of voting records on the part of the legislator and bring out the facts that is what I call 'comparative advertising.' I think there is a line that is crossed when you get into personalities and some of these side issues but when it's based on political persons record of service that is documented through a voting record or any other statements in the past, I think that is fair game.”

Negative advertising in any other aspect, Seward claims, is not something he condones. An example of the "comparative campaigning" can be seen in a recent ad by the Republican National Committee shown below.



Mackenzie Dohr, a Culture and Communications major here at Ithaca College says that negative campaigning for her will most likely do more harm then good.

“When a candidate focuses more on smearing their opponent it makes them seem as if they have no real platform to stand on so it hurts them in my opinion,” she says.

All in all, as the voters that will decide this election, we need to educate ourselves by looking at each side, at each different kind of ad campaign, and each side of an issue. Negative campaigning can help us, but it can also hurt us, this is the same with each candidate as well. No matter what candidate you support, it is ultimately up to you to decide how the political game is played. Seward says the only way to stop the negative advertising that features shameless personal attacks is to reject them so they are not successful. At the end of the day, that is the responsibility of us, the voter.