Until a few days ago I had not posted in a little over a month, and plan to only do so sporadically for awhile yet.  Actually, I had intended to take a complete break for at least five or six months.  After beating my head against a wall for much of the past year, it initially felt so much better when I stopped, but, as time went by, I realized I missed the wall.  [You have impressed me with your psychological insights., so what gives?...am I just a masochist at heart?]

But, back to the topic at hand:  You overstate my opinion of the "daisy" ad.  I didn't say, nor have I ever thought, its content was "tame".   By any standards of propriety which exist for political campaigning, it did indeed push the envelope.  But, in my view, it pushed within acceptable boundaries, and the Johnson folks unnecessarily bowed to GOP cries of "foul".  Despite it being quickly withdrawn, Republicans have now for over four decades defended their own occasionally questionable ads by repeatedly pointing to the "little girl picking daisies."  Tactics by Democratic operatives linking Bush with Byrd and racism to which fitz alluded are considerably more objectionable and less defensible. 

Furthermore, I think the floodgates for vicious campaign ads had already been blown open long before Goldwater/LBJ.  Many of the nineteenth certury campaigns for the Presidency were incredibly brutal affairs.  In the "modern" era, the use of propagandistic film to discredit a political opponent has been traced to the California gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair (the target) in the 1930's.  

Finally, it wasn't just the ad depicting Cleland and Saddam Hussein and bin Laden with the veiled reference to "courage" that generated outrage on the part of his supporters.  It was the combination of a.) the ad, b.)Republican press releases that unfairly attacked Cleland [even Chambliss renounced them], c.)Bush claiming Cleland was more interested in politics than "national security" [even though Cleland had supported the President on the war and had advocated the establishment of a Homeland Security department while the administration was still opposed to it], and d.) conservative pundits like Ann Coulter cruelly mocking the legless Cleland's war wounds. 

The Byrd commercial was not one of the Democrats finer moments, and the same can be said about the Republicans' anti-Cleland campaign.

Jer  

Jer,

The only times I ever saw the ad were when various news programs were discussing the relative merits of it.  But it had the same manipulative quality that the "if you're doing drugs, you're funding terrorists" had.  Effective?  Yes.  Distasteful?  Absolutely.

That said, along the lines of your Barry Goldwater point, do you remember the stunt Mike Huckabee pulled around Christmas?  He held a press conference where he announced he was not going to run a negative ad (I think it was about Romney...wasn't everything back then) his campaign produced.  Then he showed the ad to the media...knowing that they'd run it ad nauseum for free.  If he wasn't such a phony, he would have gotten a lot more mileage out of that stunt than he did.  Do you think Johnson's campaign was thinking the same thing when they ran the Daisy ad...pay for it once, get it run for free in perpetuity?

-fitz

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan

fitzfong.blogspot.com