Ready, Aim, Fire!

Barack Obama has been "palling around with terrorists" and wants to teach 5-year-olds about sex? John McCain is "out of touch," in bed with lobbyists behind the housing-market meltdown and doesn't know Ctrl-Alt-Delete from @?

Please. For true connoisseurs, such attacks are to negative campaigning what boxed wine is to a 1961 Château Lafite: a weak imitation of the real thing, a tease that makes one yearn for the vintages of yore. We're thinking here of vintages such as 1800 when, during the Thomas Jefferson-John Adams presidential race, the Connecticut Courant wrote that if Jefferson won, "murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes." New Englanders, Advertising Age noted in an editorial last April praising negative campaign ads, "reportedly hid their Bibles for fear that the infidel president would declare them illegal." Or vintages such as 1828, when supporters of presidential candidate and incumbent John Quincy Adams called opponent Andrew Jackson a cannibal and a murderer. The previously married Mrs. Jackson got off easy; Adams's supporters merely accused her of being a whore.

The fine tradition of negativity and attacks goes back to the nation's founding document. By the count of political scientist John G. Geer of Vanderbilt University, 70 percent of the statements in the Declaration of Independence are not uplifting promises of more-just and democratic governance, but attacks on England and George III ("He has obstructed the Administration of Justice," "He has dissolved Representative Houses" and, of course, "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people"). These criticisms "provided the basis for thinking about abuses of power and the centrality of certain basic human rights," Geer writes in his 2006 book "In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns." "Without such negativity, the argument for establishing a new nation that 'derived its just powers from the consent of the govern[ed]' would not have been possible."

While that may be hyperbolic, focusing the colonists' minds on the nefarious doings of King George III undoubtedly advanced revolutionary fervor from Massachusetts to Georgia—just as today's negative ads and their more-extreme version, attack ads, serve important electoral functions beyond getting someone elected. (We'll define negative ads as those that criticize an opponent's record or positions on key issues, and attack ads as those that rip into his character.) Recognizing the role of negative ads represents a complete about-face from the scholarly thinking that held sway as recently as the 1990s. Then, as for decades, conventional wisdom among academics and political junkies had been that sleazy ads and dirty campaigning depress voter turnout by stoking disenchantment and cynicism ("they're all liars and crooks") and polluting the electoral process, making politics so distasteful "that people want to get as far from it as possible," says political scientist Jon Krosnick of Stanford University. But both lab experiments and analyses of actual elections now show that the effect on turnout is more nuanced. Beyond turnout, there is a realization that, as Geer argues, "negativity plays an important and underappreciated role in democracies," in large part by presenting more, and more detailed, information than positive ads do. And make no mistake about what may be the most valuable information voters glean from attack ads and mudslinging: a sense of the candidate ("and I approved this message") who paid for them.

All of which is fortunate, since negative ads have become as omnipresent this campaign season as down days for the Dow. According to Nielsen Media Research, from June 3 to Sept. 7, the McCain campaign ran negative ads 76,238 times, while Obama made 75,246 such placements, with both concentrating the attacks in the battleground states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Despite promising during the primaries to run a different, positive campaign, Obama has often gone way negative: in the week after the GOP convention, found the Wisconsin Advertising Project, 77 percent of Obama's ads were negative, compared with 56 percent of McCain's. But in what may signal his growing desperation, in the week ending Oct. 4 nearly 100 percent of McCain's ads have been negative, according to the Wisconsin project, compared with 34 percent of Obama's.

If you believe pundits and voters, this should practically spell the end of democracy as we know it. Political elites, good-government groups and finger-wagging journalists regularly claim that negative ads undermine the electoral process, fail to tell voters why they should support the ad's sponsor (which is deemed more noble than explaining why they should not support the ad's target), alienate voters from electoral politics and drag campaigns down "to the level of tabloid scandal," notes Geer. The public says it shares this disdain for the negative. In a 2000 Gallup poll, only 19 percent of those surveyed said negative ads even "had a place in campaigns." Most voters say you cannot learn anything useful from negative ads. Polls in 2002 and 2004 found that 80 percent of voters believed negative ads are "unethical and damaging [to] our democracy," while 60 percent said such ads bothered them "very much."