Going Positive.(The Talk of the Town)(US presidential election)

The terms of the 2008 Presidential campaign were set twenty years ago--or, more accurately, perhaps, sometime around the fifth century B.C. In 1988, as Lee Atwater, President George H. W. Bush's young campaign manager, was contemplating how to defeat Michael Dukakis, he consulted "The Art of War," by Sun Tzu, the well-known ancient Chinese political consultant. Among Sun Tzu's pithier bullet points: "Know your enemy." Atwater conducted a bit of opposition research, identified Dukakis's vulnerabilities, and gleefully promised to "strip the bark off the little bastard." The two TV spots that ended Dukakis's political career followed in due course. One, calculated, in Atwater's words, to make Willie Horton Dukakis's "running mate," featured Horton, a black murderer who raped a white woman after escaping while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison--under a program that Dukakis supported. The other used footage from an event organized by the Dukakis campaign in an effort to show that he was tough on defense. Waving from a tank in an unfortunate helmet, Dukakis looked, as Atwater put it, like Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Those were the most memorable moments of the Bush-Dukakis campaign, and every Presidential candidate since has absorbed their lesson.

There is still a small chance that this year's general-election season will be different. Hillary Clinton's descent into Atwaterish bark-stripping has achieved its purpose, having helped to insure her victory in the Pennsylvania primary. But, according to one exit poll, sixty-eight per cent of voters thought that Clinton had attacked Barack Obama unfairly, and, in recent months, as her gibes have become increasingly nasty, her national approval ratings have dropped. Nobody seems to know quite what to make of all this, but one thing does seem clear in the aberrant election of '08: Barack Obama (still the likely Democratic nominee) and John McCain lifted themselves above the pack, despite enormous odds, largely because they pledged to be civil. At a campaign stop in Prescott, Arizona, on April 5th, McCain told the crowd, "We are Americans first and partisans second," adding that the contest "should remain an argument among friends."

Even the most conscientious candidates, of course, have moments of backsliding. They get tired and peevish. They worry that they might look weak. And they recall how effective sleazy attacks have been against them--such as the "push poll" in South Carolina in 2000 implying that McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter was a black child he had fathered. McCain was not able to recover after losing that primary. He has fared far better this year, but he hasn't been willing to abandon such techniques himself. Two weeks ago, his campaign sent out a fund-raising e-mail saying that "Barack Obama's foreign policy plans have even won him praise from Hamas leaders," and giving the impression that Obama could hardly wait to sit down with them for a genial exchange of views. McCain repeated the charge in a conversation with bloggers last week. (Never mind that Obama has repeatedly denounced Hamas and expressed unequivocal support for Israel.) There isn't much to distinguish this kind of slander from the anonymous mass e-mails sent to Jewish voters before the early Democratic primaries, in California, New York, Florida, and elsewhere, claiming that Obama is a Muslim.

Until Obama's fadeaway at the Philadelphia ...