I am intrigued by Jason's post on the "perfect campaign." I suggest no such thing has ever existed. We invent a golden age when politics was high minded and thoughtful, but that golden age, like most golden ages, never existed. First, let's remember that the Lincoln-Douglas debates took place in the 1858 Senate race in Illinois, not the 1860 presidential race. What is remarkable about those debates from our point of view is their reliance on long, complex arguments. In modern debates a long answer is ninety seconds. Lincoln and Douglas sustain arguments of ninety minutes during their debates. But the lower arts of politics did combine with this higher art. For example, race baiting was a tactic used by Douglas. I am drawing from memory, so forgive me if my facts are off a bit, but I believe it was the debate at Cairo (pronounced kay-row), which is in the deep south of Illinois (i.e., you might as well be in Kentucky) that Douglas pointed out that the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass had come to the debate in Freeport to support Lincoln. Stephan Douglas made sure to point out that Frederick had ridden in a carriage accompanied by a white woman. His southern Illinois audience got the point.
In the 1860 presidential, as was the case in all presidential races until the 20th Century, none of the candidates (with the exception of Douglas) actually campaigned. Lincoln never left Springfield. The campaign was run through surrogates. And it wasn't as if those surrogates were shy about defaming their enemies (remember that Republicans were often called "black Republicans").
Modern technology and the rise of interest groups has made the art of negative campaigning more noticeable. And the ideological polarization of the parties has bred a fresh harshness in our politics. But we should not dwell in the illusion that there was a point in our history when our politics was defined by great statesman who campaigned by presenting brilliantly argued speeches to the masses. The Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, which do represent democratic politics at its best, are not free from low politics. But even if we forgive their infrequent descents into the political nether regions, the L-D debates are by far the exception, not the rule, of American campaign history.
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