Salon has an interesting article today about the Republican party's political "attack machine." Very interesting, indeed. The main point: The Republicans have, for a very long time, been the absolute Ninja Masters of negative campaigning, and Bush's current run for re-election rests on a foundation of personal attacks, backed by an almost issue-free platform.

This brings up an interesting point: given that most voters are in no way "political junkies", it follows that most of the information upon which they base their decisions is extremely superficial: Fox News alerts, the nightly news, political adverts, and so on. The state of mass media today lends itself to instant and ubiquitous coverage of scandal. 24-hour news networks live on personal attacks at election time. Therefore, strategically, if one side makes wild (even inaccurate!) claims via the channels through which the "casual voter" gets his/her news, the opposition has two options: (1) to keep the moral high ground and continue to fight clean and respond to the attacks as they come, or (2) to follow suit and launch personal attacks as well.

The problem is, option (1) doesn't work! Because of the casual nature of the vast majority of voters, one side (in this case, the Republicans) can just launch personal attack after personal attack, and the other side just doesn't have the resources to defend itself. It's just not feasible to try to run an issues-oriented campaign while holding press conference after press conference to debunk every claim the opposition makes, no matter how inane. Thus, the most sound political strategy given the culture of the U.S. today must be negative personal attacks. Such a political atmosphere, in my view, weakens a democracy, as voters have to be aware of policy issues to make effective decisions about who their leaders should be.

Of course, one of the central premises of this argument was the nature of the mass media in the U.S. today. They love negative attacks. As they say, bad news sells, and this includes scandal. A major presidential candidate lied about his war record? Hell, that's a signal to a news company to go all in! Is the evidence credible? Eh, who cares. In the Swift Boat case, the evidence pretty clearly vindicates Kerry, but that point seems to be lost on the media. Since most voters only get the sort of digest-version news available through the mass media, the mass media must be more responsible. Profits are nice, but a strong democracy... yeah, that's kinda nice too, eh?

That's all ranting I've got for today :)