Below The Beltway

Despite her win in Pennsylvania yesterday, Hillary Clinton is taking flack today for what the New York Times calls her load road to victory:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

Well, in reality, nobody ever thought that those 20 point margins of early March would withstand six-weeks of concentrated campaigning in a single state, something we haven’t seen in a primary season in quite some time. Given the way the polls were trending even two weeks ago, it looked like Clinton would be lucky to walk out of the Keystone State with a 5-point margin of victory. The fact that she beat a candidate who out-spent her quite handily and held on to the same demographic that helped her win in states like Ohio ought to count for something.

But what about this argument against negative campaigning ?

Andrew Sullivan picks up on the theme:

It’s worth recalling what this primary came to be about, because of a self-conscious decision by the Clintons to adopt the tactics and politics of the people who persecuted and hounded them in the 1990s. It was indeed in the end about smearing and labeling Obama as a far-left, atheist, elite, pansy Godless snob fraud. That was almost all it came to be about. It was the Clintons’ core message and core belief. And if anywhere would have proved its salience, it would surely have been beleaguered and depressed central and western Pennsylvania; and it would surely have worked with white ethnic voters over 50.

Sullivan thinks that this is bad thing and claims that younger voters are turned off by it, but I’ve to wonder — what’s so bad about negative campaigning ?

Why is it wrong to point out your client’s voting record ? Or bringing to light controversial statements they’ve made in the past ? Or pointing to their association with someone who says things like “God Damn America” or is proud of the fact that they blew up buildings ?

Politics ain’t beanbag, and, at the Presidential level, it isn’t all about sweetness and light and meaningless phrases like “hope” and “change.” When you’re running against someone for office, you obviously need to give people a reason to vote for you, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with pointing out reasons they should vote against your opponent. In fact, without negative campaigning, all we’d get are the same platitudes that Barack Obama was repeating in his speeches throughout the first two months of this campaign. Nice to listen to, but, in the end, meaningless.

And if you think things are bad today, then you need to take a look at what they said about men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Warren Harding when they ran for President. Karl Rove’s tactics are nothing compared to those of James Callendar.

So buck up, boys and girls.