A clean campaign pledge? Can't hurt

By HOWARD TROXLER, Times Columnist
Published December 19, 2006

Did you think the 2006 election was the worst ever when it came to sleazy campaign attacks?

It's the normal way to run a campaign these days. File your papers. Set up a bank account. And launch into accusing your opponent of being a bad person.

Why? Two reasons.

First, the insiders say that it works.

No matter how stupid or ridiculous the accusation (for example, that a candidate supports child molesters), somebody believes it.

Even if only one person out of 100 buys it, that can make the difference in a close race.

It's not even necessary for voters to believe every accusation literally. Just a general cloud of suspicion is enough.

Attack ads also work by getting people not to vote. This explains why political advertising, as opposed to almost any other kind, can be so sneering and cynical.

When Ford and Chevrolet advertise, they want a bigger share of a big market. It's in everybody's interest to sell as many cars as possible.

But when campaigns advertise, they don't care how few people vote - as long as their side gets the most.

In a couple of races in 2006, the attack ads were so clumsy or offensive that they seem to have backfired. But unfortunately that's the exception.

Here's the second reason that sleazy attack ads are the general rule: because candidates never believe their own ads are sleazy.

Never once, not in nearly three decades of following elections, have I heard a politician or a campaign manager admit to using unethical ads. Their defenses always boil down to (1) He Hit Me First and (2) Well, It's Technically True.

Something happens to a lot of people who run for office. They naturally think of themselves as The Good Guy. Inevitably, that means the other candidate is The Bad Guy. And it's okay to attack bad guys.

So any attempt to change the culture of attack politics has to consider these two factors: Attack ads tend to work, and nobody admits that his own ads are bad.

This brings us to Pinellas County, which is considering a "code of ethical campaign practices." The idea is that the county would offer candidates a chance to sign a pledge to run clean campaigns.

Candidates wouldn't have to sign the pledge. Neither would there be any punishment for signing it and then breaking it.

But the hope behind the proposal is that candidates who made the promise and then broke it would suffer in the court of public opinion.

The pledge includes a promise not to distort or misrepresent facts, make personal innuendoes, attack opponents on the basis of religion, race and so forth, and to repudiate any outside attack made on those grounds.

That last point is important, because many attacks these days come from the Democratic and Republican parties, or their surrogates, instead of individual campaigns. It would be worth it just to see an outbreak of candidates publicly disavowing the sleazy tactics of their own parties.

We should be a little queasy about the government being involved in the standards for campaigns at all. If Pinellas were proposing to judge which candidates were being "unethical," this would certainly be a bad idea. And yet our system has become so brutally cynical, so awful, that maybe the pledge would do some good. It is hard to see how it could hurt, anyway.