"A blow-dried bellhop to the rich."
That's how Mike Freeman, a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate for governor in Minnesota described a Republican opponent recently, admitting he cribbed the insult from fellow Democrat Ted Mondale, also a candidate for governor in the Sept. 15 primary.And Freeman, son of the former governor and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, says he believes in campaigning in the style of "Minnesota nice."
Uh-oh. The 1998 election cycle is well under way. And so are the parade of the barbs, the commercials, the snide remarks, the innuendo, the negativism that voters say they hate.
Voters SAY they hate them, but they WORK.
There is at least one race where past adultery is an issue (although the wronged wife is sticking by the candidate).
In Georgia, a Democratic candidate for governor is chiding his primary opponent for a 1975 vote against the Equal Rights Amendment and opposition to a state lottery in 1980.
There's peace. There's prosperity. But there's a also a big election in November (one-third of the Senate and the entire House are at stake). So campaign ads are starting in earnest and millions of dollars are being spent to sell political brands in a year when it is expected that only about one-third of voters will vote.
"TV has changed politics forever," says Michael Deaver, a former political consultant who helped engineer the TV photo opportunities of former President Reagan's largely successful first term. "But we haven't figured out how to use it to fit the (political) system yet."
The Project on Campaign Conduct is trying to push candidates into signing codes of conduct - no personal attacks on other candidates, no use of language or images that define other candidates based on race, sex or personal characteristics and no questioning another candidate's honesty, in-teg-ri-ty or patriotism.
The project sponsored a poll by Democrat and Republican polling firms that showed that 79 percent of 1,600 registered voters in Ohio and Washington say they would "have more respect" for candidates who signed and abided by such codes.
"According to the poll, roughly 80 percent of the voters in these two states believe negative, attack-oriented campaigns are unethical, damage our democracy, lower voter turnout and produce leaders who are less ethical and trustworthy. By a 3-to-1 margin, voters feel campaigns have gotten worse in terms of ethics and values in the last 20 years," the Project on Campaign Conduct concluded.
A code of conduct is a nice thought, but it's not likely to work. Candidates who spend millions of dollars trying to get elected are too desperate in the waning hours of a campaign not to try a tactic that has been proven to work. Negative ads often are sickening and appalling and often skim the border of being stupid, but, again and again, they get candidates elected.
As Vince Lombardi once said: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."
Sometimes negative ads are even more informative than ads that don't mention an opponent. A study by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that negative ads sometimes have more substantive information about policy than personal "I'm-a-great-guy" ads, which often are deceptive.
The bottom line seems to be that we're doomed in the short run to attack ads. But the time inevitably will come when peace and prosperity are not in such abundance and American voters will once again pay attention to what candidates say about their own ideas for the country.
The ideal is contrast ads, in which candidates honestly contrast their ideas with those of their opponents, forgoing derogatory implications about their opponents' personal characteristics.