Despite the preponderance of negative campaign ads this year, real campaign rhetoric has lost the vigorous tone of an earlier America.
Rather than the muscular insults which used to color politics, modern debate is puny. From the days when slander, character assassination, and gross insult enlivened political campaigns, we are reduced to faint fault finding, “outing.” And dirt by association. The erstwhile vigorous portrayal of political opponents as everything from animals to criminals has dissolved into wishy-washy euphemisms. Candidates have become bloodless wimps in the combat of contempt. Torch light parades have been replaced with the Internet. Colorful insult has dissolved into political trepidation.
Tom Jefferson was accused of having congress with a young lady of color (which, by the way, now appears to have been true) – but that insult was like being called a liberal by Rush Limbaugh today. Even Fox News, the moral harlot of the media, lacks the color of really insulting language when disrespecting truth or trashing Democrats.
Today’s ad homonym attacks are faint replicas. Opponents of the war are charged only with lack of patriotism. (Why not sedition?) Those who object to tax breaks for the rich are accused only of class warfare. (Why not communism?) Present day accusations lack the zip that calling for a lynching inspires. They are nothing like, “my opponent stinks like a rotten mackerel shining in the moonlight,” as was once alleged on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Where are the muscular epithets, such as those that described Abe Lincoln as “nothing more than a well meaning baboon,” or James Blaine as a “continental liar from the state of Maine,” or Reagan as “A triumph of the embalmers art,” or Jesse Jackson as, “this guy is a piece of crap,” or of FDR, “If he thought cannibalism would get him votes, he’d have a missionary roasting in his backyard now.”
Look at England where political insult is alive and well – of Margaret Thatcher – “Attila the Hen.”
The other day a Virginia hopeful did call a dark skinned photographer “macaque” (small monkey) but has since destroyed the hearty quality of this riposte by apologizing, even by claiming he didn’t know the term was insulting – which was not only a bald faced lie, but cowardly.
This slide into bland political vanilla has also defused political debate. Debates have morphed into scripted Q&As, in which direct answers are never heard. Vicious accusations and scathing vernacular have been replaced with talking points. When given two minutes a presidential candidate in 2004 couldn’t think of a single mistake he had made in four years, and what’s most important – his opponent let him get away with it!!
Politicians fail us by not alleging chicanery and thievery of each other. There must be scoundrels somewhere. How are we to know the truth about these people who want to feed in the public trough? We need a score card to tell us who are already criminals or idiots – against those who aspire to those positions.
Where is Joe McCarthy when we need him?
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