As the race for the US Republican party nomination meanders between four different candidates, the use of negative campaigning has assumed new significance. Mitt Romney, the wealthiest candidate, has relied on the largess of so-called Super-Political Action Committees (PACs) – nominally independent of his campaign – to harry opponents with timely attack ads. Candidates with smaller budgets have taken a more direct approach, raising embarrassing questions about Romney’s past at a private equity firm that earned large profits while laying off hundreds of workers from companies it had acquired. And yet despite the mudslinging no candidate has emerged with a decisive advantage.
Romney’s supporters have painted his rivals as seasoned politicians, heavily compromised by their pasts. The counterblasts to these charges have been equally underwhelming. Mindful of widespread anger over the current administration’s forgiving approach to Wall Street, Romney’s opponents have emphasized that his private equity firm, Bain Capital, continued to pay its executives handsomely even when they mismanaged the newly acquired companies, or drove them into bankruptcy. Other candidates have tarred each other with hypocrisy – Gingrich secretly dated a congressional aide while he hounded President Clinton over the Lewinsky affair – or racism in long-forgotten newsletters, misogyny, and homophobia.
In this hothouse atmosphere gestures have usurped ideas. Romney looks like a US President from central casting, and he plays his candidacy accordingly, saying whatever his audiences want to hear, and, if necessary, flatly denying stances taken years, months or even weeks earlier. The opportunism has made his candidacy verge on incoherence. Having done his best to downplay the patrician associations of his wealth – a part of the American Dream desired and loathed in equal measure during a recession – he nevertheless accepted an endorsement from the celebrity financier, presidential birth-certificate conspiracy theorist and huckster Donald Trump. Trump’s political backing is, at best, a mixed blessing, but his reach into the world of infotainment – on which the battle for the Republican nomination may well be decided – is exemplary.
In what may be the canniest gesture to date, Rick Santorum, a conservative Catholic, recently allowed the media to film him talking to a group of evangelical Christians in a church, asking for their support. Santorum then walked into the crowd and let them perform a “laying on” of hands – to pray for him to receive the appropriate blessings and guidance. As he is already well known for his strong stance on divisive social issues – homosexuality, abortion – the image effectively anointed Santorum as the chosen candidate of the Christian Right, despite his Catholicism.
These contortions – a list of stage-managed photo opportunities could go on indefinitely – shouldn’t be necessary, but they have now become a permanent feature of American politicking. Following a Supreme Court decision two years ago, in Citizens United, to treat political advertising as a form of protected speech, the corrupting influence of money on politics has never been more rampant. Last September the Center for Responsive Politics estimated that even though only one party will be holding a primary campaign, spending for the presidency, Congress and state elections in 2012 will exceed $6 billion. Most of this money is squandered on television advertising that is more perishable than a carton of milk. Yet, despite the system’s clear shortcomings, and a few recent half-hearted efforts at reform, the trend towards larger campaigns continues.
The former New York editor Max Frankel has written that “Most of those thirty-second ads are glib at best but much of the time they are unfair smears of the opposition. And we all know that those sordid slanders work – the more negative the better – unless they are instantly answered with equally facile and expensive rebuttals.” So the circus continues. Meanwhile, serious questions about debt, education, health care, foreign policy and the candidates’ worldviews – what George H W Bush is said to have disparagingly referred to as ‘the vision thing” – have gone largely unnoticed by the American voting public.
Political images have always played an important role in serious campaigns, but the reductive power of images has come to dominate American politics. A striking illustration of this tendency came when Arizona Governor Jan Brewer publicly pointed her finger in the face of President Barack Obama during his recent visit to her state. Brewer grew heated with the President after he took issue with a description in her memoir that he had tried to “lecture” her during a 2010 White House meeting on immigration. The Washington Post subsequently reported that ‘Scorpions for Breakfast,’ the memoir in question, subsequently shot from No 285,568 to No 7 in Amazon’s book rankings within 48 hours of the altercation. The incident is a good example of the reflexive politics that has now taken root in the United States, producing a great deal of political theatre, but doing very little to further the interests of enlightened democracy.
