Even as Hillary Clinton is being criticized for going negative on Obama (and Obama is apparently making the most of it), as I try to clean up e-mail from the past week, I see a similar pattern starting to emerge over on the GOP side.
It’s a testament to Mike Huckabee’s rising status in recent days that, even before the Des Moines Register poll came out, he was under attack by Mitt Romney:
- This one, headlined FACT CHECK: HUCKABEE AND GIULIANI SUPPORT TUITION BREAKS FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, came in last Thursday.
- The second, headlined THOSE WHO KNOW HIM BEST… DISCUSS GOV. HUCKABEE’S TAX-AND-SPEND RECORD, came in on Friday.
And as we know, THEM’S FIGHTIN’ WORDS among the sort of folk Romney is trying to win over (and trying to express that he is one of, which is the amusing part).
Of course, Romney wasn’t entirely alone in going after Iowa’s new front-runner. Here’s a release from Fred Thompson. Poor ol’ Fred just wants to get noticed these days, I suppose.
Related Posts
I can’t tell from your post if you view “going negative” negatively. I think that’s a weird issue in this campaign, suddenly talking about other candidates’ positions is “throwing mud.” Who is going to tell us the negatives about each candidate? Certainly not the candidate, and the press is not very good about issues during the horserace. The reality is people only spend so much time looking through blogs and factcheck.org. It behooves any presidential candidate to “go negative,” although that obviously has some downside.
When a politician goes negative, its an almost certain sign that he/she has no new ideas to offer, and no overarching vision. That person is reduced to the one thing even little children do–find something belittling to say about the other person. I’m not saying that I politician cannot disagree with someone’s policy or current statement; but they need to attack the policy, not the person. Attack ads such as those you mention demonstrate the poverty of the attacker’s vision, and the paucity of his/her wit. Unfortunately, they all to often help the worst to win.