Campaign Relief: Our Name Is Mud

By: John Hanchette If a researcher plugs "presidential campaigns and mud" into Google these days, the popular search engine comes up with more than 46,500 hits. Sad to say, that number is likely to double in the eight weeks left until Election Day.

Despite lofty entreaties by both presidential candidates and their minions to keep it clean, the press needs to get ready: The campaign for the White House from here on seems inevitably headed for Mudville, a slimefest that will make the Bush-Gore contest of four years ago look like a church lawn social.

The political tea leaves do not lie. Over the weekend, liberal columnist Susan Estrich - campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988 - wrote that, following the slams at Senator John Kerry during last week's GOP convention, her "Democratic friends are mad as hell, and they aren't going to take it any more."

Estrich predicted angry Democrats, outside the party machinery, will now spend millions of dollars to publicly suggest that, among other things, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney both have booze problems, not to mention several DUIs. "What their records suggest," wrote Estrich, "is not only a serious problem with alcoholism, which Bush but not Cheney has acknowledged, but also an even more serious problem of judgment." She envisions "a long and ugly road to November."

There is some evidence that Kerry will take Estrich's advice and hit back hard. Minutes after the Republican convention wrapped up, Kerry told a latenight Ohio crowd that "I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who misled America into Iraq."

Newspaper opinion pieces and editorials now blossoming tend to decry the imminent mud-slinging in less flammable language. But these print observations are becoming more and more direct. The Lansing State Journal over the weekend told readers the Swift Boat political ads attacking Kerry's combat record "sink to such a level of sleaze that Michigan Republicans and President Bush are well-advised to denounce the ads in their entirety."

The 2004 presidential election, of course, is not the first time in the history of the republic that prominent politicians of different stripes have called each other names. Federalist Alexander Hamilton described Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican (today's Democrats), as a dangerous "subversive" who was a "fanatic" and an atheist to boot. Jefferson returned fire, claiming Hamilton was trying to "undermine and demolish the republic."

Even the Father of Our Country could not escape such contumely. His now-celebrated farewell address was described by at least one newspaper of the day as the "loathings of a sick mind."

Kerry might do well in the upcoming mud brawl to hire someone like James Carville, the Democratic consultant and rapid-response expert who kept Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign on track despite intense GOP resolve to dig into Clinton's character -- or as then-Senator Alan Simpson, a razor-tongued Wyoming Republican, colorfully put it to a group of us covering that interesting race: "We're going to peel Bill Clinton like an onion, layer by layer."

I don't remember Carville's precise response -- something like, "that would only make the peeler cry" -- but the point is, he kept his candidate on message, hewing to the theme "It's the economy, stupid." That devotion to one strong idea eventually overcame all digs at Clinton's private life, and showed the strength of constructing a campaign theme relevant to American voters.

Bush has a pretty strong one, as comedian-commentator Bill Maher identified it: "Vote for Me or You'll Die." But so far as I can tell, Kerry has yet to hammer one into the voters' consciousness.

What's a reporter to do when the mud starts to fly in earnest? Based on having covered six presidential campaigns at close hand, here's what I would suggest:

Report the accusations, for they tell as much about the accuser as the accused. Then search out the truth or falsity behind the accusation and report that, too. If it's unavailable before deadline do it the next day.

Try not to encourage these two candidates in their media mudslide. They both seem to have nasty tempers.