campaign tatics, mudslinging, etc.
 

no, this isn't exactly what the topic says. anyways...

i was thinking earlier today about how i've seen people post here and on fark (or maybe just fark, can't say for sure) stating how they "aren't happy with bush but kerry hasn't given them a reason to vote for him." sometimes there's mention of how politicians (both sides) more often then not just bad mouth their opponent, often not even about the issues, rather than telling us what they plan on doing (details and whatnot).

anyways, what i was thinking was that this is probably mainly caused by our two party system. rather than needing to tell us what they plan to do, politicians can focus more on slinging mud and appealing to voters emotions. i mean, why bother telling people why your better than your opponent when you can just try to make them look bad? instead of trying to convince voters your the best choice, you can convince them that your oppenent is a bad choice, so by default, you must be better.

is this a negitive aspect of our american system? do you tfp'ers from outside the states find campaigns and tactics for them are different (if you're from a multiparty system country)? any other thoughts?

-hh

I think mudslinging should be outlawed in fact i wish campaigned was restricted like TV comercials where you can't mention competeing products in the US (or at least i think). That way polititions could only talk about themselfs and people would decide what they liked better. The only time they could actually bring up their opponates would be in the debates.

It wont stop until the voters decide it wont influence them.

It's a nice idea, but consider if there was a convicted child molester running for office who recently held a rally where he advocated grinding up "excess" children to be sold as food to the mentally handicapped because "they can't tell the difference anyway."

Sure that's an extreme example, but if you were running against this piece of human slime wouldn't you want your constituents to know about it? And, as a voter, wouldn't you want to know if one of the candidates endorsed baby eating?

And less extreme, wouldn't you want to know if someone running for your local county commission had only moved in to your county two months ago?

Negative ads, as disheartening as many of them are, have their place.

Bottom line, the whole campaign system is broken--from finance to advertising. I dont really know what needs to be done to fix it (wish I did, though ;)), but I do know that it is horribly broken in its current form, giving huge influence to special interest lobbyists and leaving room for name calling and mudslinging rather than intelligent debate.

Politicians, big companies, government, everyone else, all do bad things because they think they can get away with them. The problem is that we confirm that belief.

Re: campaign tatics, mudslinging, etc.
 

These people simply aren't paying attention. Kerry has spent the past month or more campaigning positively. Sorry, but if you didn't catch the primary message of the Democratic National Convention you have no one to blame but yourself.

I don't see how a multiparty system would be any better. You'd still have the mudslinging. There are also bigger problems. Say we had 4 parties. In a close race, the winner might only get 30% of the vote. We'd probably need to have some runoff system that would just increase the amount of time needed to campaign.

What if a non-partisin commitee was formed that had to approve all adds that were run. The adds could not contain lies or missleading stats.

People have their biases, plus that would be a LOT of power in only a few hands. Ontop of that who would pick the non-partisans? Partisan politicians.