Time to End the Mudslinging

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Time to End the Mudslinging

Ralph Brauer 10 Mar 2008 The Strange Death of Liberal America

The Clinton-Obama contest now threatens to take the entire Democratic Party–and maybe America–down with it. Where once the Democrats all but had the keys to the White House in their pockets, now they resemble some drunk staggering home from a bad bar fight who can’t remember what happened to those keys.

Deciding which candidate to blame for this gets has become impossible, because both are guilty. The fault lies not so much in the candidates as in their elders, the leaders of the Democratic Party. This includes former Presidents, former Presidential candidates, and Party officials. The donors to the campaigns also bear responsibility.

...Meanwhile Democratic Party officials are behaving like referees who have lost control of the game. Start with the much-discussed superdelegates. It would take only a few phone calls for the superdelegates to issue a joint statement condemning negative campaigning along with a pledge to withdraw support for any candidate who goes negative.

Other Party officials seem to have surrendered their ability to control the contest. Democratic Party head Howard Dean has disappeared from sight. The heads of various Democratic Congressional campaign committees have become so anonymous that everyone has forgotten their names. Their inaction is not only self-destructive but stupid since they will need a strong candidate at the head of the ticket to reach their goal of building a veto-proof majority.

Finally there are the people providing the money for all this negative campaigning. I have always wondered why the big donors didn’t get together and refuse to contribute to negative campaigns. There are several major donors to both the Clinton and Obama campaigns who could stop the mud-slinging in a minute by merely threatening to pull their donations. The same goes for PACs like EMILY’s List and ActBlue. The AFL-CIO could also end it by issuing a statement condemning negative campaigning and threatening to withhold support

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