Posted by debrazza on Fri Aug 1, 2008 at 4:09 PM Pacific

The Truth About Negative Campaigning

Guest post by debrazza

We've just spent the last 2 weeks witnessing a relentless negative barrage of attacks from the McCain campaign against Barack Obama.  It looks ugly, it looks scattershot, it looks ridiculous.  So why do it?  It works.  And here's why:

1. The media loves it.
2. It defines your opponent.
3. It works.

1. The media loves it.
Despite all the hand wringing that you hear in the press about how disappointed they are in how negative the campaign is getting, don't believe it for a second.  It's conflict, conflict makes news, conflict draws eyebals and conflict sells.  That is why they loved the primary, that conflict generated high ratings and huge profits.  It is why, during the most disgraceful debate moderation performance in American political history, Charlie Gibson referred to the primaries as boxing match, calling the debate in his very openning comment, "sort of round 15 in a scheduled 10-rounder."  And that outlook of course dicating the ridiculous questioning from those two disgraces for journalists.

This very week, just as we have seen print publications all calling out St. John for the dishonesty of his relentless attacks, all of the cable and national news organizations dutifully and gleefully repeated the ads over and over and over on a loop as the centerpiece of their news programming, most without even reporting that the charges were false.

By relentlessly and carelessly repeating the negative attacks over and over and over again for free, the media have their money where their mouths are regarding their most precious commodity (air time) and decided, despite all the accompanying hand wringing, that they enthusiastically endorse these tactics.

2. It defines your opponent.
Whether fairly or unfairly, the only way to define your opponent is going negative.  That is the reality of politics.  The point of defining you opponent is to get the regular media and journalists to incorporate your message into their narrative.  For the Obama campaign, they have sort of hap hazardly tried to get at the McCain/Confused narrative, with mixed results.

Instead of trying to get journalists to adopt a new narrative for Obama, the McCain campaign has instead decided to redefine an existing narrative, Obama/Rockstar as negative.  It is shrewd because the only thing it asks of journalists is to reframe their existing reporting from "Obama Rockstar!" to "Obama Rockstar?".

You cannot do this without going negative and the Obama campaign should learn a lesson from this and make McCain's "maverick" image negative.  The questions are already out there, the Obama campaign only needs to reinforce it.  The key question should be, "can America afford to have an unorganized and undisciplined President considering the challenges we face?".

3. It works.
McCain has not been effective at increasing the number of people that support him, but he has driven more people from Obama to undecided.  Negative campaigning works because it brings everyone down.  McCain is already sitting at his solid level of base support, so I doubt he will go much lower.  He doesn't want or need to present his own agenda, he only needs to bring Obama down.  I doubt that McCain will be able to increase his support above 45% during the course of the campaign, so the obvious GOP game plan has to be to keep it close like this by going relentlessly negative and then hoping beyond hope, that like during the primaries, late deciders will break away from Obama.