The only good news for the Republicans coming out of the seemingly endless presidential candidate “debates†is that some Republican leaders are now belatedly thinking about how they can avoid a repetition of this debacle in future elections.
What could they possibly have been thinking about, in the first place, when they agreed to a format based on short sound bites for dealing with major complex issues, and with media journalists — 90 percent of them Democrats — picking the topics?
The conduct of the candidates made things worse. In a world with a record-breaking national debt and Iran moving toward creating nuclear weapons, they bickered over earmarks and condoms. I am against earmarks, but earmarks don’t rank among the first hundred most serious problems facing this country.
Mud-slinging has replaced rational discussions of differences on serious issues — not only during the debates themselves, where the moderators sic the candidates on each other, but even more so in the massively televised character-assassination ads in which Romney supporters seem to specialize.
Groups supporting Mitt Romney have turned character assassination almost into a science. You take something that most people, outside of politics, do not understand and twist it to sound terrible to those who are unaware of the facts.
Blanketing Florida with misleading ads attacking Newt Gingrich won that state for Romney, after Gingrich scored an upset victory in South Carolina. The ads made a big deal out of charges that the former speaker broke tax laws — charges that the Internal Revenue Service exonerated him of, after a long investigation.
When Rick Santorum suddenly surged after his upset victories in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado, the Romney character-assassination machine attacked him for having voted in the Senate for various things that conservatives don’t like.
But, when it comes to voting in Congress, seldom do you get a pure bill that you can agree with in all its parts. If you never voted for bills containing anything you didn’t like, you might get very little voting done.
But, if it is a bill to provide American soldiers with the equipment they need to fight a war, and somebody has put into it an earmark for a federal boondoggle in his district, are you going to vote against that bill and let American soldiers go into battle without all the equipment and supplies they need?
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/292106/pettiness-and-mud-thomas-sowellFWIW
