Has Presidential Negative Advertising Reached a Tipping Point?

While in St. Charles, Mo., on Monday seeking to bolster his flagging presidential campaign, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., took aim at the two favored candidates duking it out for the GOP nomination.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., are waging a war in "gutter politics," as they spend millions of dollars on negative television advertisements in Florida, Santorum said.

While Santorum hardly is known for his positive political tone, he's got a point.

An overwhelming amount of the more than $15 million spent by Romney or his surrogates in Florida went to advertisements attacking Gingrich's credibility, or lack thereof. Gingrich, in turn, has turned to calling Romney a "maniacal liar."

Frankly, both might be right.

But what does all this negative, attacking rhetoric say about the state of our politics in America today? It's worth noting that the amount of money spent on behalf of Romney in one state, Florida, is more than all of what Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., spent in the entire Republican primary campaign in 2008.

Former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, addressed the impact of all this negativity in an interview last week with Voice of America.

"This massive injection of millions and millions — hundreds of millions of dollars — and the spending of a lot of that money on a negative campaign to destroy the reputation and character of our opponents is what has divided our country. That division takes place not only in the congressional district or in a state, but it carries over into Washington.

It also permeates, I think, the general society, where you have very rigid, now, blue states and red states, which we didn't really know when I was in politics," Carter said.

There always has been negative advertising in politics, but the increased divisiveness of our body politic, combined with the flood of millions of campaign dollars unleashed by the misguided Citizens United court decision, has led to what political advertising analyst Ken Goldstein of Kantar Media CMAG has called the most negative campaign he's ever seen.

This morning, Romney was expected to awake to a reinforcement of his "go-negative" strategy. Most polls predicted he would win the Florida primary easily on Tuesday.

That result follows the one in South Carolina, in which Gingrich's negative attacks were rewarded.

Regardless of who ultimately wins the GOP nomination, the downward trend is bad for the long-term health of our nation.

Carter points out that although he and Republican Gerald Ford, his opponent in 1976, campaigned hard against each another, their decision to not spend most of their campaign in the gutter led to a lasting respect and friendship. In fact, they made a pact that when the first one of the two men died, the survivor would deliver the eulogy at the other's funeral. Carter fulfilled his promise at former President Ford's funeral in 2007.

Does anybody who has been observing the vitriolic exchanges between Romney and Gingrich believe either man could make such a gentleman's agreement today?

Of course not. But that has become the nature of our political warfare. We no longer have "distinguished opponents," as Presidents Carter and Ford called each other, but combatants so focused on destroying each other that compromise — even decent conversation — becomes next to impossible.

Our nation deserves better.

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