THE CAMPAIGN that ended a week ago was negative, unfair, unintelligent, dirty, nasty, brutish and long.
I miss it already.
Complaining about dirty politics is America's second oldest tradition. Practicing dirty politics is America's oldest tradition.
Negative campaigning is older than the Republic. The sainted writers of the Declaration of Independence did a number on George III that Newt Gingrich never matched.
But Newt's pretty good at it. He blamed Susan Smith's murder of her own kids in South Carolina on the Democratic Congress.
Of course, dirty politics is bi-partisan. Missouri Democrat Alan Wheat blamed the murder at the Pensacola abortion clinic on his Republican opponent in the Senate race, John Ashcroft.
Why do politicians resort to stuff like this? Because it usually works.
Adlai Stevenson once said that "he who slings mud loses ground." Adlai was above negative campaigning. He coined that aphorism in 1954, two years after he got swamped in the 1952 presidential election and two years before he got swamped again in the 1956 presidential election. Thanks in large part both times to vicious attacks on him by Tricky Dick Nixon.
Tricky was the running mate of Dwight Eisenhower. Ike held politicians in contempt, but he understood politics enough to know that while he himself was taking the high road in his campaigns, someone else had to take the low.
The award for the most negative sound bite this year goes to Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia. He called his opponent, Oliver North, "a document-shredding, Constitution-trashing, commander-in-chief-bashing, Ayatollah-loving, arms-dealing, drug-condoning, Noriega-coddling, Swiss-banking, law-breaking, letter-faking, self-serving snake-oil salesman who cannot tell the difference between the truth and a lie."
Robb won. More important than that, this ultra-dirty campaign -- North was pretty good at it himself -- increased voter turnout by about 950,000 votes over the last off-year Senate race in Virginia. That was an 87 percent increase, the highest percentage increase in any statewide race in the country.
Conventional wisdom has it that negative campaigning drives down voter turnout. Clearly it doesn't. My theory is that it is in Americans' genes to hate politicians. We'd rather vote against a candidate than for one. Negative campaigning is good for the system.
Some journalists don't like negative campaigning. They overlook the fact that our business has a long history of very sharp criticism of politicians. I think it's what we do best.
I've always liked H. L. Mencken's justification for it. In 1928, recommending that The Sun's editorial page get more negative, he said, "It is just as creditable to hate injustice and dishonesty as it is to love the truth. One of the chief purposes of The Sun, as I understand it, is to stir up such useful hatreds."