Friday, January 13, 2012Of Candidates and Negative Campaigning Happy New Year to all ! “[At Bain Capital] We got money from other
people and we would use that to help start businesses or sometimes acquire
businesses that were in trouble or not doing so well and then try and make it
better or get the businesses to grow.” Mitt
Romney, Republican presidential candidate, former governor of Massachusetts
and former venture capitalist and corporate raider (January 8, 2012) “I like being able to fire people who provide services to
me.” Mitt
Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and former venture capitalist and
corporate raider (January 9, 2012) “They [the corporate raiders] apparently
looted the companies, left people unemployed and walked off with millions of
dollars, … if somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your
company and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions,
that’s not traditional capitalism.” Newt Gingrich, Republican presidential
candidate and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (January 8,
2012) “I think people who don’t serve when they could and
they get three or four or even five deferments – they have no right to
send our kids off to war … I’m trying to stop the wars, but at
least, you know, I went when they called me up.” Ron Paul,
U.S. Congressman and Republican presidential candidate (January 7, 2012) In current American politics, money and wars of aggression abroad seem
to rule the day. When a candidate’s fortune turns sour, the natural
reflex is to spend $millions in negative ads to destroy adversaries and/or to
issue hawkish policy statements with the promise to start new wars abroad and
even to rekindle
old ones. The motto seems to be that “If you destroy me
with your negative ads; I will destroy you with mine.”—This is
truly amazing. Lobbyists have always
played an important role in U.S. politics, but with the floodgates of money
presently wide open, their work has been considerably facilitated. Indeed,
since the U.S.
Supreme Court’s (5-4) January-20-2010- decision to allow unlimited
amounts of money to be spent by corporations or labor unions during elections
under the specious pretext that such legal organizations are
“people”, money rules unimpeded in American politics. This has
the more or less unanticipated consequence of raising negative campaigning to
a new level, to the delight of corporate media which rake in hundreds of
$millions in political advertising or propaganda. Can democracy survive such
an onslaught of money? This remains to be seen. As for the U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for instance,
during the recent primary campaign in the state of Iowa, he was confronted
with a sudden surge of popularity of one of his opponents, former House
Speaker Newt Gingrich. Romney’s camp and its allies went to work and
pumped more than $2.8 million in a TV air
deluge of negative ads against candidate Gingrich, arguing that
the former Speaker had “more baggage than the airlines” and
spelling out a series of flaws in Gingrich’s long political career.
Sure enough, Newt Gingrich soon plummeted in the polls in Iowa and even
nationally. He finished a distant fourth (13.3%) in the Iowa Republican
Caucus (U.S. Presidential Primary) of January 03, 2012, while Republican
candidate Romney squeezed by to finish in 1st position. In retaliation, the Gingrich’s camp has opted to turn the tables
on candidate Romney for the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries and
has tried to picture him as the Wall Street movie villain Gordon Gekko.
Indeed, thanks to a “super PAC”, supposedly financed by casino
billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is reported to have poured $5 million into
Mr. Romney’s campaign, it intends to pump some $3.4-million into new television
ads in order to picture multi-millionaire candidate Mitt Romney as a
cold-blooded capitalist
raider who made his fortune on the back of workers when they were fired en
masse, after Mr. Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital of
Boston, gorged itself on financially stressed companies. Mr. Gingrich has even suggested personally that Mr.
Romney’s company was comparable to “rich
people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.” —And there you have it, negative campaigning at its best! Negative
ads, whether they are based on facts or on fabrications or on outright
lies, can be very effective politically
because they raise doubts in the mind of undecided or hesitant voters, even
though some voters may be repulsed and turned off by them and this could
translate into lower voter turnout.
Nevertheless, the more distracted people are, the more they tend to remember
negative information better than positive one. Therefore, for those who have
no scruples in relying on such tactics and who have the means to pay for
them, negative campaign ads have a triple
advantage: First, they are a good way to change the subject and steer the
debate away from one’s own failures; secondly, they place adversaries
on the defensive, forcing them to spend time and money to try to refute the
attacks; and, thirdly, they dispense the attackers from clearly spelling out
their own positive political agenda beyond generalities and pious slogans. Negative
ads maybe a curse for democracy but they work for those unethical politicians for whom power is the only
thing that they yearn for in politics. But negative campaigning or smear
campaigns cost a lot. Indeed, they have to be researched and produced
and, above all, they must to be aired in the mass media, especially on
television. Historically, negative campaigning
has always existed. However, modern means of communication and the
concentration of national wealth in relatively fewer hands have multiplied
its influence. Indeed, in the modern free-for-all electronically based U.S.
politics, it can be said that those with the most money and with fewer
principles have a decisive, if not an insurmountable advantage in winning
elections. In the U.S., and especially with the benediction of a majority of
judges on the current Supreme Court, so-called “super PACs” can
accept unlimited donations for purposes of supporting or attacking
candidates, thus placing the political game clearly in the hands of people or
corporations or labor unions with the most money. Money has thus become the
principal deciding factor in American politics. The current campaign is a clear
demonstration. Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, an economist, is the author of the book “The
Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, Please visit the book site at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ Posted, Friday, January 13, 2012, at 5:30 am Or
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