Barack Obama: the Political Defeat of Negative Politics

Professor John Geer, in his book “In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns,” says that modern political science has arrived recently at an unexpected consensus: “Mudslinging, politics that use ferocious and personalized attacks as weapons, is an important phenomenon in democratic life, and is, therefore, a phenomenon that must be studied, discussed, and valued in order to give it the place it deserves in the workings of the [democratic] system.” (p. 18)

Geer is of the opinion that modern mass electoral campaigns, which move about tumultuously in Hertzian waves, protagonized by large political parties, claiming ownership of huge candidates with financial resources, are more and more negative, acerbic, and toxic. “With George Bush (Sr.), in 1988, the trend was solidified; it was then that more than 50 percent of campaign ads on TV and radio were dedicated to discrediting one’s adversary.” (p. 20) Since then, American politics and-–whether from imitation or inevitable contagion-–politics in almost the entire world have resorted to negative attack ads, to the use of bile as a main weapon.

The matter is so serious that Geer prophesied only two years ago: “It is a form of politics as inevitable as scandal, a tool whereby past contradictions, incongruencies, incompetencies, and risks that politicians can make due to too much power are exhibited, publicized, and put on display… In that sense, it is a new form of social control.” (p. 21)

What are we left with, then? Democracy of denunciation, the system where a candidate’s defects become the most important issue, the litmus test that decides who is incapable of governing because of their blunders, even though the electorate ends up voting for the other candidate without conviction, enthusiasm, or zeal. All of this has appeared as if it were an original political theory created by professors, publicists, consultants and television commentators in North America, Europe, and Brazil in the first years of this century. The truth is plain and simple: politicians, existing political parties, and their candidates are so flawed that the only thing for us to do is to choose the least worst, saving ourselves from the shock of a revelation that had already been alluded to by dubious omens.

That is how things were in the United States until Barack Obama’s campaign arrived. He reversed the rules of the game and put matters back in order: it is the office seekers who uses negative campaigns that suffers from a lack of moral standing, that is a simpleton with nothing to offer, nothing to excite voters; that shamelessly sows diatribes, contempt, and insults in television and radio waves; or worst of all, is a simple cheat mucking around in the biographies of their competitors.

And that, to my understanding, is the chief merit of their strategy: revealing the intellectual and moral poverty of negative campaigning, whether they be from the Democratic primary candidates, which believed him to be an inoffensive black man, useful as a politically correct showpiece, from an exasperated Hillary Clinton or from a conservative with expertise but little spirit, like John McCain. Half the world has noticed the Obama campaign’s innovations, including what they perceive to be most fundamental: the skillful and unexpected use of the Internet to raise funds and establish partnerships with millions of Americans (for example, Steve Schiffers, of the BBC); the dazzling recuperation of the old arts of discourse, rhetoric, and persuasion that come together in memorable speeches (Silva-Herzog Marquez del ITAM); the multitude of innovations he dared to unfold in the campaign (D. Brooks of the New York Times), or his ability to captivate the world, in massive and spectacular never-before-seen tours through Asia and Europe (The Economist).

I offer a different inventory: the radical innovation Obama brings to worldwide democratic culture is the defeat of negativity as a political discourse, a clear and rotund refusal of the idea that an electoral campaign can only successfully flourish though outbursts of mudslinging, slander, and insults. On the contrary, his standard tools have been intelligent verbalization (including to the point of intellectual pedantry), timely responses to each attack, unconditional respect for his opponent, irony, and humor, raising the bar of political debate. That does not mean that Barack Obama does not show up to debate that he avoids confrontations, difficult issues, or does not know how to react abruptly and severely. On the contrary, his strength has been in intercepting, point by point, accusations and rival criticisms, and returning them as proposals, demonstrative actions, or satirical spots, but without submitting to the temptation to ignite his own dirty war.

The Economist (July 19) takes stock of the mud slung at the Democratic candidate from when he began his campaign to his tour through Europe: 56 personal insults hurled dozens of times on national television (“an unprepared type unfamiliar with the dynasties that know how to govern North America,” “a black man with a complex,” “a Muslim in disguise,” “a coward in the face of America’s enemies,” “ignorant on foreign policy, “a race traitor seeking to rub shoulders with the politically powerful,” “incompetent and lacking skill on military matters,” “a celebrity as empty and vacuous as Paris Hilton,” etc.). But Obama has not succumbed, and has won, belying the simple strategies that have been approved even by certain academic circles, supposedly liberal, like Dr. Geer’s. This is good news, because it shatters a destructive trend in American, and with it all Western, democracy.

Thus we can evaluate the real and lasting effects of campaigns as celebrations of insults (systematically studied, for the first time, at the Raymond Aron Institute by Pierre Rosanvallon): negative campaigns condense opinion and reduce the voter’s reasoning, because as an opponent summarizes the worst of politics, the most important issue becomes, simply, impeding the other candidate’s advance. Mudslinging has asymmetrical effects and the opposing candidate bears their weight, because if the choices are so bad or risky from the point of view of the message receiver, it will always be better to stick with the known evil. In this system the right emerges victorious, because it foments distrust in political parties, in the government, and in the State. The very usefulness of politics is called into question, and thus the status quo is reinforced.

Worst of all is the mass conclusion to which the electorate arrives, because faced with such a disastrous and destructive spectacle of insults exploding in every direction, the voter concludes: “Politics is a dirty mess,” which only disappoints and discourages a large number of citizens. It is no coincidence, says Rosanvallon, that the era of negative campaigning coincides with the period of least electoral participation by Americans.

And finally, there are the wounds and dysfunction left behind. If campaigns become mad lapses of insults and offenses, governing becomes more complicated when they end; the defeated candidate has a hard time accepting dialogue, collaboration, or compromise with someone that limitlessly derided them. Before Obama, everything seemed to point to the decline of active and persuasive public deliberation as the foundation of voting and democracy; everything seemed to indicate the triumph of rejection, mistrust, and skepticism toward politics, politicians, and political parties. But a reformist, moderate, positive, black candidate, grandson of a chicken farmer in Africa, is turning that cynical vision on its head (even if only once). And that is worth celebrating.