Robert Dallek Quotes
Despite all the public hand-wringing about negative advertising, political veterans will tell you that it persists because, more often than not, it works. But tearing down the other guy has another attraction: It can be a substitute for building much of a case for what the mudslinger will do once in office.
Dallek, Robert. Opinion Column. Reuters, 2012.
In this dirty technique some people who knew the candidate at one point in his/her life “organize” and “independent” organization with funding from a partisan individual or organization. They then create attack TV and web ads against the candidate that include serious untruths as well as misleading accuracies. When the candidate is asked about the lies and exaggerations, he/she refuses to comment and only says that he/she cannot be held responsible for anything that anyone says against his/her opponent or anyone else. The candidate adopts a policy of not commenting on any political ads other than the ones he/she is responsible. This produces viscious false attacks on an opponent with the candidate completely shielded from responsibility.
35 years later Richard Gephardt used the same phrase to describe Republican tactics.
Sinclair was a writer who had written about some of the worst scandals in American politics, leaned toward socialized democracy, and decided to run as a reform candidate in California where he lived. He won the Democratic primary easily even though he had no money, political experience, or backing. He terrified the Republicans who ran one of the dirtiest campaigns in American History to defeat him spending more money than in any election up to then including the Presidential elections. (for more details see {619613}) Sinclair lost, but it was close.
Robert A. Dallek is an American historian specializing in the presidents of the United States, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He retired as a history professor at Boston University in 2004 and previously taught at Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Oxford University. He won the Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 as well as other awards for scholarship and teaching.
