Those who carp about the use of negative campaigning might benefit from reading this U.S. News commentary from Dick Morris, who has offered John Locke Foundation audiences his own no-holds-barred assessments of election prospects in the past. (You’ll find examples from April here and here, along with an October 2007 prediction here.)
Morris contends voters benefit from access to information about candidates:
If there is one Darwinian adaptation that the American people have made to modern times, it is the ability to sift through a wide variety of claims and to determine for themselves which are specious and which are accurate. We realize that the days during which we could trust any one media outlet or candidate to give us the full story are long over?if they ever existed in the first place. We realize that truth is a synthesis of the various claims made by the left and the right, the Democrats and Republicans, and the incumbents and the challengers.
Voters see negative advertising as another form of information. They so distrust politicians that they want to see their opponents tear them down so they can get at the truth. In fact, voter attitudes toward politicians are akin to their opinions of criminal defendants (they could be forgiven for confusing the two). Just as juries want a prosecutor who tears the defendant apart and punches holes in his alibi, so they want a political candidate to run ads exposing his opponent.
