A week before Americans cast their votes, Brian Moore, the Socialist Party’s nominee for the White House, was on the Colbert Report discussing Obama’s candidacy. “He’s a [capitalist],” Moore complained of his Democratic rival. “His party is a capitalist party and he’s propping up the capitalist system with the bailout.” Communists, socialists and the rest of the normally splintered far left all seemed to agree: Obama is not one us.
John McCain and Sarah Palin, however, had come to a vastly different conclusion. While McCain was describing Obama as America’s “redistributionist in chief”, Palin was warning voters “now is not the time to experiment with socialism.” Republicans had spent the entire campaign trying to pin a label on the Illinois senator. Obama’s reluctance to wear a flag pin on his lapel left him open to charges of unpatriotism; the outbursts of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, coupled with unfounded rumours about Michelle Obama’s supposedly racist thesis on race relations had others accusing him of ties to black nationalist movements; his middle name (Hussein) and his early education in Indonesia were often trotted out as evidence he is (or once was) a closet Muslim; and finally, as if being described as a toxic combination of Hugo Chavez and Louis Farrakhan weren’t enough, Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers had Palin accusing him of “palling around with terrorists.”
None of the accusations were true. What’s odd, however, is that none of them stuck. In the battle for the Republican nomination in 2000, McCain’s first bid for the White House was partly scuttled by a whispering campaign painting his adopted Bangladeshi daughter as an illegitimate love-child. In 1988, the GOP relied heavily on a controversial ad that grossly exaggerated Michael Dukakis’s role in the release of prisoners on weekend passes to win the White House. And in the 2004 presidential race, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were so successful in undermining John Kerry’s military record that the group’s name was eventually transformed into a verb synonymous with attacks that are as dishonest as they are well-orchestrated.
Going negative, as general rule, is an effective strategy. A study conducted in final weeks of the 2004 presidential election found negative ads caused 14 per cent of viewers to change their minds about their favoured candidate. Positive ads, on the other hand, led only five per cent of viewers to adopt a more favourable view of the candidate they oppose. Given the tone of recent presidential races, one of the great successes of the Obama campaign may very well have been its ability to avoid the smear. “Obama, quite skillfully and with enormous discipline from the beginning, set up a counter-narrative that he was the person who rose above the pettiness of contemporary politics,” says Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. “By the end, smears did a more effective job of defining the Republicans.” But Obama’s compelling image as the man-above-the-fray may not have been enough on its own.
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