David Shribman
Here is just one day's recent exchange between the two presumptive nominees for the presidency of the United States:
He said she "spread death, destruction, and terrorism everywhere she touched." She said "he's going after me personally because he has no answers on the substance." He said she was a "world-class liar." She said he had "reckless ideas that will run up our debt and cause another economic crash." The general election campaign hasn't even started, and yet Manhattan billionaire Donald Trump and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton have jumped the gun. In fact it seems as if they are firing away – without hesitation, without reluctance … and perhaps without changing the course of the campaign at all.
Mr. Trump, after all, boasts that he has been the target of more sustained and more vicious attacks than any candidate in American history. (He may have forgotten that Abraham Lincoln, the second person to win the Republican presidential nomination that he has now virtually wrapped up, was called "nothing more than a well-meaning baboon" in 1860 and that Grover Cleveland was taunted by Republicans in the 1884 election as the father of an illegitimate child, making the phrase "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" part of the campaign rhetoric.)
Ms. Clinton, for her part, has been a target for a quarter-century, often from people whom she described during her husband's presidency as being members of a "vast right-wing conspiracy." (But the attacks on her have been perhaps less powerful than those against two other first ladies, Rachel Jackson, the Bible-toting woman accused of marrying the man who would become the seventh president before her divorce to her first husband was finalized, and against Mary Todd Lincoln, the fragile woman accused of pro-Confederacy sentiment during the Civil War.)
So, astonishing as the Trump-Clinton political rhetoric may be, it is not exactly new. But what is new is that the two major-party candidates may spend the next four months exchanging barbs that sear the ear. Plus this: Messrs. Jackson, Lincoln and Cleveland never engaged in face-to-face presidential debates. Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton will share the same stage – they will be within 1 1/2 metres of each other – three times in the fall, in St. Louis, Las Vegas and Dayton, Ohio.
Ordinarily the heavy lifting of heaving criticism falls to the vice-presidential nominees of both parties. This was the role Richard Nixon played for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, with Spiro Agnew doing the honours for Mr. Nixon in 1968. Neither candidate for the presidency in 2016 has made a vice-presidential selection yet, but the possibility remains that the joust-and-parry routine the two presidential nominees have been engaging in will be conducted in stereo, with their running mates chiming in helpfully though probably not charmingly.
"Whether in politics or business, attack ads seldom help the product or person mounting the attack," says Daphne Taras, dean of the Edwards School of Business at the University of Saskatchewan. "But they can hurt the object of the attack. These negative bromides can stick."
The classic negative campaign advertisement occurred in 1964, when the Lyndon Johnson camp prepared a spot with a three-year-old girl pulling off daisy petals in a field as a missile countdown proceeds. The ad ended with a nuclear mushroom cloud. The spot was so powerful that even though it aired only once, it has become part of American political folklore and is considered a major reason why Mr. Johnson defeated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the GOP nominee, in a November landslide.
No one knows for sure how these attacks shape a presidential election, nor how effective they are; what worked in one campaign may not work four years later. For that reason, a daisy ad in 2016 might have no effect at all. Mr. Trump has been pilloried by his rivals – Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, his last remaining Republican opponent at the time, described him in late March as a "a snivelling coward" – and the attacks have had no effect at all, except perhaps to make his supporters more ardent and his opponents more frustrated.
Even so, repeated attacks sometimes do stick; they helped portray Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts as a feckless liberal partial to allowing hardened criminals go on crime rampages during weekend passes in 1988. The fusillade of attacks by Vice-President George H.W. Bush's camp against Mr. Dukakis so embarrassed the Bush campaign that the artist of many of the ripostes, Lee Atwater, apologized to Mr. Dukakis.
The 2016 campaign may be remembered as the one that was simply an exchange of jeers and catcalls. The very day he described Ms. Clinton as a "world-class liar," Mr. Trump, who made his career in business, accused his rival of being more interested in assisting big businesses than in assuring jobs for American workers. "She gets rich," he said, "making you poor." The story of this election may be how the two candidates have made American political rhetoric all the poorer.