Anders Hanson

I ask this question after reading in The Guardian about the leadership debate on The Politics Show followed shortly by an article about New York firefighters opposing Rudy Giuliani’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Where I’m coming from is this. American politics, from the eyes of those of us across the Atlantic, is characterised by relentless negative attacks on your opponent and finding the slightest wrongdoing or policy weakness, exaggerating it massively and then spending thousands running negative campaigns attacking your opponent on those handful of issues. These attacks are either mounted directly by your opposing candidate or by some new organisation set up by ‘interested parties’ who oppose your election, such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who tried to undermine John Kerry’s presidential bid by claiming that he was lying about his Vietnam record.

OK, so Chris Huhne’s criticisms of Nick Clegg are not quite in that league, far from it, but what is happening in the Liberal Democrat leadership campaign is far more negative than we have seen before, and is something that even the other parties have stopped doing in their leadership elections (when they bother to have them). It is one thing to question your opponent on their views and to challenge them on their record, but to send a briefing to ITV which contains distortions to try and brief against your opponent is underhand. Still, it has had the unintended consequence of making many people who watched the programme ring up the Clegg Campaign to offer their help and support.

I accept that negative campaigning is a standard part of electioneering, whether people like it or not. All opinion polls will tell you that the public don’t like punch and judy politics and they don’t like negative campaigning, but the reason why parties do it is a mixture of hotheadedness and the fact that negative campaigning usually works. Actually, that is a simplification. Negative campaigning works when what you are saying is reasonable and you are drawing parallels between what you say and what they say. But to distort your opponent’s views, tell people he is lying and then simply barrack them on national TV does not, in my view, come within the bounds of being reasonable. Particularly when that opponent is in your own party. If Nick is elected leader, and if the other political parties (as I suspect they will) use the ‘Calamity Clegg’ line against him, then Chris will have seriously undermined the party as a whole and not just Nick Clegg.

The reason I ask the question in the title of my post though is because that is how I feel about it. It struck me when I read the Guardian that there were clear parallels, but I am unsure as to whether it is an exaggeration to say that the Huhne campaign is adopting American campaign techniques or not. Another thing I’ll throw in though is that Chris Huhne bought me the book “Buck Up, Suck Up and Come Back When you Foul Up“, when I worked for him, which perhaps could give some validity to my question. This book by James Carville and Paul Bergala covering Bill Clinton’s campaign techniques is interesting and yes, there are useful things in it, but whether we want to adopt that way of campaigning is something I have major doubts over.

My final comment on the Politics Show debate though is purely a personal gripe. I wish politicians wouldn’t use the phrase ‘flip-flop’ to describe an opponents political views. It is yet another Americanism that came over here following the Bush versus Kerry presidential contest, and I just hate the phrase. It says nothing and just annoys me. Nothing rational I know, but a personal feeling.

GUARDIAN: New York firefighters to oppose Giuliani

N.B. Thanks to Nich Starling who I hope won’t mind me stealing his alternative Chris Huhne logo.