The meanest presidential election campaign since … the last one

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/meanest-us-election-campaign

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For a couple of weeks now, American media outlets have been informing us that the 2012 presidential campaign is the "meanest ever", the "most poisonous", playing to the "lowest common denominator" and displaying "a new level of vitriol". Campaigning has become "about as ugly as I've seen it get," trembles Fox News's Brit Hume, while CNN's Soledad O'Brien calls the rhetoric "nastier than ever". Even Donald Trump thinks "it's a very dirty campaign", which must be distressing for the germophobic property developer and all-round decent chap.

Here (inspired by Elspeth Reeve of The Atlantic Wire) are the Google News results for US politics stories featuring the phrase "a new low". Both Democrats and Republicans, it seems, are scraping the bottom of the barrel so vigorously that they've scraped through it, only to discover that it's actually a false bottom, thus providing them with a new bottom to scrape – and who knows how many bottoms there may be? Perhaps it's a bottomless barrel. Or what if the barrel were to roll down a hill, making its bottom, measured relative to sea level, even lower than before? Urgent questions, I'm sure you'll agree.

Except that – as former Obama campaigner Blake Zeff laid out this weekend in an excellent piece at Buzzfeed – the "meanest campaign ever" claim falls apart the minute you scrutinise it. "It's not [even] the most negative campaign of your lifetime, unless you happen to be three years old," Zeff writes. This year, the Obama campaign has alleged that decisions made by Mitt Romney resulted in a Missouri woman's death; in 2008, Sarah Palin accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists"; in 2004, Dick Cheney suggested that a John Kerry presidency would put the US at risk of a "devastating" terrorist attack. John McCain tweeted that this year's campaigning was "the worst I've ever seen", apparently forgetting Karl Rove's efforts in 2000 to spread the rumour that he had fathered an illegitimate black child. Remember Palin's "pro-America areas" of the country? What about Willie Horton? Or the barrel-scraping of 1800, when Team Jefferson accused their rival, John Adams, of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character", part of a campaign so generally negative that it would have given Brit Hume a conniption?

Even if you could reliably measure meanness, then, this surely wouldn't be the meanest campaign ever. All we're witnessing is this year's version of what I suppose we'd better call the meta-campaign. It's a time-honoured tactic: when your campaign isn't going so well, simply make your campaigning about the campaigning instead. It is no surprise whatsoever that Romney's advisor Eric Ferhnstrom has been leading the "meanest ever" charge, nor that he should be joined in it by Trump, who as birther-in-chief long surrendered any standing to accuse anyone else of meanness. The promotion of Paul Ryan as a "serious" vice-presidential candidate – to be contrasted with that gaffe-prone liability Joe Biden, as if Biden's gaffe-proneness were somehow news – is arguably another example of the meta-campaign. Don't think too hard about what a Romney administration would actually do to Medicare, the insinuation goes; don't focus on whether the charges being made are truthful. Instead, give us credit for elevating the campaign by discussing the issue at all.

To the politicians who deploy it, the benefits of meta-campaigning are obvious: you get to claim the moral high ground, implicitly casting yourself in the non-partisan position of a commentator on the campaigns, as opposed to a dirty-handed participant. More baffling is why campaign reporters continue to fall for it, year after year, then enthusiastically start making the "meanest ever" charge themselves. The most cynical interpretation is just that they need August stories. Nearer the truth, I suspect, is that it appeals to their obsession with appearing "balanced", regardless of the real distribution of mendacity between the two sides. In this sense, "the meanest campaign ever" is a premier case of the View From Nowhere. It pretends to neutrality (thereby offending nobody) while still purporting to embody a moral judgment and pack a rhetorical punch, thereby seeming astute.

And if voters grow wise to all this? Then, I'm afraid, it'll be time for politicians to unleash the meta-meta-campaign: claiming the high ground by campaigning about how the other side is campaigning about the campaign. There's already a hint of this in Robert Gibbs's response to the meanness charge (and I suppose this blog post is an example of it, too). And after that? Meta-meta-meta … you get the picture. This isn't the meanest campaign in history. But perhaps by November we'll be able to say with confidence that it was the most meta.