In Defense of Negative Campaigning

Abstract

When televised presidential debates were first held in 1960, many commentators deplored them for their shallow, insubstantial nature. But when scholars write about those debates today, they almost invariably comment about how much better the Kennedy-Nixon encounters seem than any of the more recent presidential debates. ' Students to whom I have shown excerpts from these debates usually have the same reaction. Compared to the Great Confrontations of 1984, 1988, and 1992, the 1960 debates seem more civil, more intelligent, more substantive. Especially noticeable is what is missing from the 1960 debates: the nastiness, the evasions, the meaningless memorized one-liners designed only to be featured on the postdebate newscasts, the boos and applause from the studio audience. Nostalgia is not in general a helpful tool in policy analysis. Claims about how wonderful things were back in some past golden age usually do severe violence to the facts of history. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that American election campaigns have become significantly worse over the last three decades. The 1988 campaign, in particular, convinced many Americans that there was something seriously wrong with the way we conducted our campaigns for public office. In the years since then, there has been a burst of activity-including study commissions, academic research, grassroots organizing, and legislative proposals, as well as the usual quota of lamentation and hand-wringing -all with