by Craig A. Butler
Daily Lobo Columnist
Well, the election is over. Once again the campaign season was long, competitive and at many times downright nasty. Despite every candidate's professed dislike for attack ads, our airwaves have been filled with mudslinging so thick that it's hard for anyone exposed to it to feel clean.
Nobody seems to like negative campaigning, yet every election cycle we are treated to another load of it. Do campaign managers keep following this strategy because they don't know what else to do, or because it actually works?
There is a legitimate need for voters to be aware of the history of the candidates they have to choose from. Without spending a lot of time researching a politician's voting history, it would be hard for the working voter to stay abreast of the careers of those running for office.
Non-partisan voter guides do exist, published by the League of Women Voters and others, to help clarify things a bit. In New Mexico, the Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission publishes a guide to the judges who are up for election and retention. Despite the excellent quality of such guides, they cannot possibly discuss any candidate in great detail.
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So there is some value in having the candidates call one another on actions they have taken in the past. Voters deserve to have access to information that might change their vote, like how a legislator has voted on issues that are important to them. However, as campaigns get nasty, the ads quickly go from being informative to being blatantly insulting.
This is partly an understandable human response. When someone puts out a series of television ads attacking a person's career and implying outright criminal activity, it is hard not to respond. Imagine seeing your face in a TV commercial accompanied by all kinds of slanderous accusations. It is easier to tell someone else to turn the other cheek than it is to have to do it yourself.
On the other hand, sometimes negative campaigning simply seems needlessly vicious. In this year's election, take a look at Bill Richardson's campaign for governor. His victory seemed assured from the moment he announced his candidacy. Yet his campaign spent a lot of time and money sending out mailings and buying advertisements that attacked his Republican opponent.
A race where one contender is clearly ahead and likely to win should be the cleanest and most civilized. The likely winner should have the decency to be polite about his victory, or at least pretend his opposition doesn't exist. In closer races, the urge to put down an opponent is even stronger, and the results even less pleasant.
One possible solution is public financing of campaigns, a favorite issue of the Green Party. This plan would have all candidates receive an equal share of funds to campaign with and forbid them to raise other funds. Since the government-allotted funds would be far smaller than the millions thrown around in today's campaigns, politicians wouldn't be able to buy half of the commercial airtime on TV and would be more likely to spend their scant dollars getting their own message out.
Of course the difficulty with that plan is that none of the candidates who were elected using funds from large contributors will ever support it. Also, it would infringe on the longstanding tradition that campaign contributions are a form of free speech. The switch to positive campaigning will have to come from somewhere else.
Possibly the most significant step would be for candidates running for very visible offices to try it. They should announce publicly before the race that they plan to keep smiling no matter what is trotted out, and then stick to it. Let the opposition get themselves dirty by digging into the mud, and see whether or not voters appreciate a pleasant alternative.
