Sullivan's New Contest

Andrew Sullivan has an interesting proposal over on his blog. He’s creating a contest to see who can make the most cynical, manipulative, distorting ad they can post to YouTube. The idea is to make sure that political hatchetmen like Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt don’t have any material left to work with – this way, they’ll have to deal with substantive issues, as all the nastiness is already out in the open.

I can see a couple of problems with this idea. The first is that this kind of contest implies that there is a kind of parity in the types of campaigns that Obama and McCain are running. From what I’ve seen, this simply isn’t true. Obama, in the primary and now in the general, has gone out of his way to be as evenhanded as possible, to try to not attack, and when he does, attack on issues and not on character. Part of this, of course, is the fact that he has to campaign this way. The media would never let him get away with attacks the likes of which McCain has been running.

In fact, part of what’s so appealing (as Sullivan has extensively noted) is that Obama is above (or at least too smart to engage in, not quite the same thing) the kind of campaigning that McCain has been reduced to: comparisons to disgraced pop singers, stunts with tire pressure gauges, flat out lying about Obama’s relations to the troops. This is precisely why so many committed Democrats wanted to see Clinton running against McCain – because she could get down in the mud with him and duke it out.

But despite that, Obama won the primary. He’s run a campaign that has largely avoided the pitfalls that McCain’s hacks are waiting with salivating jaws to spring. The recent gas ad that the Obama campaign ran was an order of magnitude classier than the stuff the McCain camp has run.

The second problem I have with the idea is the implication that when presented with the facts, the American public will make a reasoned, rational decision based on facts and a clearheaded reasoning. I don’t want to be cynical about it, but I don’t think this accurately reflects the way people make these decisions. I think that there’s no way to know what this kind of experiment would do to the campaign, but I’m pretty sure that “improving the tone” is not a likely outcome.