The Obama campaign has set up a pretty little site listing all the defamatory mailings, robocalls and push-polls the Republicans have been running against them this year. Take a look at it here.
At risk of reading this backwards, let's just ignore the robocalls themselves for a minute (plenty of time to get angry about that later). What's really interesting about this site? First, the financial resources the Obama campaign have at their disposal are once again allowing them to paint a picture of a disreputable rival who stoops to nothing to win power. This is despite the fact that McCain has occasionally disagreed with some of his more ridiculous supporters when they stood up at meetings and called Obama a terrorist. When Kerry took government funding, he was left with no equivalent resources to highlight the smear campaigns of the Republicans - and so they were left to stand unchallenged. (Compare Gil Troy's recent post: "When Republicans Raise Big Bucks They are Being Plutocratic, When Democrats Do It They Are Being Democratic.")
Second, we can see exactly what states McCain is worried about. The smear campaigns are precisely targeted at Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico in the West; Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the South; New Hampshire in the Northeast; and Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the Midwest. (God knows there's probably some people in Oklahoma who probably haven't even realised there's a campaign going on yet!)
Of course, nothing new here. Only fight the battles you need to win. But this kind of careful targeting - engaged in by both campaigns for fairly obvious reasons, to maximise the bang for your buck - is worrying. It's what produced the debacle of 2000: when the two campaigns campaigned so carefully to balance against each others' advantages that they unintentionally produced a dead heat and a constitutional crisis. And it helps explain why Red state voters identify with McCain's claims that Obama is the one running the most negative campaign in history, and reject the Democrats' claims that McCain is the sewer politician. After all, they don't get to see or hear any of these robocalls and defamatory mailings.
In short, the 'all politics is local' mentality, which leads to politicians not bothering to fight huge regions of the country, is a prime contributor to the political polarisation of American society. Politicos segment the voters up, and society ends up segmented as well. The best thing either candidate could do for political unity, then, would be to spend a little time in 'no-hoper' states they can win - and try and persuade those who disagree with them of the merits (or at least the seriousness and sincerity) of their ideas.
... And after that they can fly back home to New York and Texas on their pigs.
Think Of the Children
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