“The idea that this campaign is the sleaziest ever is absurd”

Politico:

David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief strategist, said Sunday that John McCain is running the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history.” It was a line trotted out all weekend by various Obama staffers as part of an effort to portray the Republican nominee as a purveyor of the slimiest tactics in recent memory.

Yet presidential historians and political scientists interviewed by Politico scoffed at the notion, suggesting McCain’s approach is no harsher than those used in previous modern campaigns and certainly not by comparison to many historic campaigns.

“The idea that this campaign is the sleaziest ever is absurd,” said David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers who has written books on Presidents Coolidge and Nixon. "In fact, there's been very little that's below the belt, and aides have been fired on all sides when they've gotten near, let alone crossed, the lines. There's nothing at all to rival the Swift-boating of Kerry in 2004, the imputations of un-Americanness to Dukakis in 1988, the anti-Catholic stuff against Al Smith in 1928 and the regular resort to slander and character assassination of so many 19th-century campaigns."

“It’s not new or novel,” said Vanderbilt University political science professor John Geer, author of "In Defense of Negativity." “McCain's tactics are no different than what we've seen in recent years," he said. "Presidential campaigns in the past few decades were worse in many ways.”

Geer, who researched his 2006 book in part by watching virtually every presidential campaign spot from 1964 to 2004, points to the 1964 election, among others.

In that contest between President Lyndon Johnson and Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Democratic president offered the notorious “Daisy Girl” ad that suggested election of his Republican rival would lead to nuclear Armageddon. A lesser-known but equally hard-hitting LBJ attack portrayed a young girl licking an ice cream cone as a woman off-camera suggested nuclear radioactive material generated by a Goldwater administration would poison the food supply.

And it’s often forgotten that 1984 Democratic nominee Walter Mondale ran a bruising set of attack ads against President Ronald Reagan. Channeling LBJ, themes included possible nuclear war — footage of children was interspersed with ballistic missiles and nuclear explosions — along with slashing attacks over fiscal and foreign policy, Geer said.

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The story continues to make the false claim that the sex education ad was false. Check the post with the Byron York link below for more details on what was in this legislation. What is interesting about this story is that the media is pushing back on the Obama team's exaggeration now. That is a real mistake when you are accusing your opponent of exaggeration.

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