Who is running the more negative campaign?

[dragonrider]

People say they hate negative campaigns, but it happens every election: negative attacks during debates, negative speaches at rallies, negative ads on air and in print, negative attacks by "proxies" who can say things a campaign could never get away with, and robocalls that invade your privacy with negative blather. No wonder we hate politics and government in general by election day. But not all the rallies, ads and calls are negative. Some stick to issues or talk about their own candidate in a positive light.

So what do you think? Considering their overall campaigns, who do you think is running the more negative campaign this year, Obama or McCain?

dragonrider Reviewed by dragonrider on 10-22-2008. Who is running the more negative campaign? People say they hate negative campaigns, but it happens every election: negative attacks during debates, negative speaches at rallies, negative ads on air and in print, negative attacks by "proxies" who can say things a campaign could never get away with, and robocalls that invade your privacy with negative blather. No wonder we hate politics and government in general by election day. But not all the rallies, ads and calls are negative. Some stick to issues or talk about their own candidate in Rating: 5

[illnillinois]

both are nasty people,

but atleast John is not having his plans fall into place..
ANTICHRIST OBAMA '08

[dragonrider]

I think McCain is running a far more negative campaign than Obama is.

Palin has suggested that Obama is a socialist and has said he pals around with terrorists. People who have introduced McCain and Palin at rallies have insisted on using Obama's middle name to play on xenophobia that maybe he is middle eastern, and they have suggested he is not Christian by saying millions of non-Christians around the world are praying for Obama to win and prove their Gods are more powerful than the Christian God. Proxies such as Rep Michelle Bachmann have called Obama Anti-American. Nearly all of McCain's TV ads are negative. McCain has hired the same robocalling agency who Bush used to smear McCain in 2000, and is using them to smear Obama with guilt by asociation to Ayers.

In contrast, Obama's campaign does not seem very negative to me. In the California market, we don't get very many ads from either candidate because we are considered a lock, but I have seen about 5 Obama ads on TV. They were all 100% about Obama and didn't even mention McCain. Obama hasn't tried to label McCain with unfair characterizations such as "socialist" or "terrorist" or "Anti-American." I haven't seen any proxies unfairly attacking McCain. I have definitely seen negative comments by Obama, Biden, and proxies about McCain's POLICIES and RECORD. Which I personally feel are fair game. They can be considered a form of negative campaigning, but they are about legitimate policy differences, not bogus labeling, guilt by associatiton, and hate-mongering. I find policy-related negative ads to be fair game as long as they are not based on lies or misrepresentations.

About the only kind of character-related negative comment I have seen by the Obama campaign against McCain has been to call him "erratic." Personally, I think that McCain HAS been erratic, and it is legitimate to point it out --- his campaign moves erratically from one thing to the next with no clear message, and his behavior during the bailout negotiations seemed unpredictable, inconsisitent and not well-thought-out to me.

Other than calling McCain "erratic" and making negative comments about McCain's policies and record, has Obama made any other kind of negative attack against McCain? I am not aware of any. Nothing to compare to calling someone a non-Christian, Middle Eastern, anti-American, socialist terrorist. That is why I think McCain's campaign is far more negative than Obama's.

[eg420ne]

I wish someone would post a negative ad from Obama..........thats not true like McCalin does on a daily basis

[rebgirl420]

Both sides are horrible.

Both stretch the truth in their ads and are doublespeakers. They do it on t.v. (news and other shows), radio, print, online, and the worst of all: word of mouth (those talking points that blind America listen to and repeat, ON BOTH SIDES).


But you don't need this incredibly biased poll to tell you that.

[dragonrider]

Both sides are horrible.

Both stretch the truth in their ads and are doublespeakers. They do it on t.v. (news and other shows), radio, print, online, and the worst of all: word of mouth (those talking points that blind America listen to and repeat, ON BOTH SIDES).


But you don't need this incredibly biased poll to tell you that.

By "incredibly biased poll," are your saying the poll itself is DESIGNED in a biased way, or that the results are biased, maybe by the slant of the kinds of people who are mostly on this site. I'm asking because I tried not to make the poll itself slanted in any way --- no leading questions, symetrical response choices, and a neutral response option.

If you meant that the "sample group" here on the site might be slanted a bit, you are probably right. But remember, it was not very long ago that this politics forum seemed to be domintated by conservative voices, so I guess these things must fluctuate. I'm not really sure how that works.

About the rest of your post, I have to agree that both sides do use way too much double-speak. They are also both guilty of taking the other's statements and policies and records out of context and spinnning them and misrepresenting them. That's definitely a huge problem on both sides, but mostly I was asking about negative campaigning, which I think is a different problem.

[rebgirl420]

I meant the slant from the people answering. The poll itself isn't biased.

[maladroit]

i think the attacks on obama from within and outside of mccain's campaign are truly distressing...you don't see john mccain being portrayed as an anti-american, treasonous, secret muslim, terrorist revolutionary that should be executed...the campaign against obama takes swiftboatery to a new level

[IAmKowalski]

The attacks that the McCain camp officially and unofficially has made against Obama have gotten more and more desperate - McCain is losing badly and is grabbing at ever nastier straws. The problem for them is that when they throw out the "Palling With Terrorists" attack, the average person is capable of looking up the facts and finding out exactly who Bill Ayers is (Bill Ayers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) and this causes a backlash against the McCain campaign. They throw out charges of election fraud and ties with this apparently evil commie group Acorn - the problem is that once gain most people are capable of finding out for themselves who Acorn is (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) and what the actual facts are on what McCain has called the worst case of election fraud in the history of the nation (YouTube - Obama, ACORN, and voter fraud myths dispelled)

So what is the end result? Their base gets worked up - they have reasons for their hate, and they aren't the kind of people who are going to look into the facts - they want these facts to be true so they don't want to dig into it at all.

For the rest of America, however, these tactics have caused a backlash against McCain - people don't like being lied to. People don't like be treated as idiots. When a candidate is blatantly trying to deceive the public, the public tends to get a bit angry, and that candidate tends to lose votes.

The funny thing is that the McCain campaign's response to falling further and further behind in the polls is to grab at ever more desperate claims against Obama - and push themselves even further behind. At this point, they can't win the election - but they can keep it up and make their party irrelevant for years and years to come by throwing away what credibility they had left. I say, let them!

[psychocat]

From my viewpoint as an outsider I would have to say McCain seems to be the worst.