Republicans said the same thing in 2008.

Still my favorite political ads ever :

Dale Peterson runs for Alabama Agriculture Commissioner :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU7fhIO7DG0

Later, he throws his support behind a different candidate :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GabMEHfCjT0&feature=relmfu

Fantastic use of the word "rip" and also of firearms haha

That was pretty alright. But why are people so keen on spending campaign money to attack their opponents? It's unbecoming of a future leader.

Well, I'm sure it happens in every country. It just seems strange for it to be such a major part of politics in the US.

Actually, it might be the worst political ad ever. I hate when politicians use zero rhetoric in their bashing over their rivals. Ads such as this should be banned from politics forever.
Political campaign focused on attacking your opponent instead of showing why you are better candidate should be a short way for loosing the election.
But yeah, it happens everywhere. Politics = kindergarten , most of the time.

Because it works. Analyses have shown that trying to throw mud at your opponent is often more effective than trying to convince voters of one's own vision. At least in the US, where the respective studies were done, it might be different in other parts of the world.

This is kinda sad, isn't it?

But it doesn't always work. Major Polish opposition party focused their entire campaign on bashing over opponents and it didn't give them nothing. They had exactly the same result as ratings were from the beginning.

Yes, it's _very_ sad imho. A democracy in which slander is the most efficient way to get you to the top is pretty much defunct, since the competition of ideas that _ought_ to be the strength of a democracy gets distorted and marginalized.

Like in Poland (from your example), I doubt that such a strategy would be very successful in Germany right now. Generally, attacking one's opponent in such an obviously unfair way would be regarded as a very poor style, and it would raise the question whether the campaign was so little convinced of their own agenda that they are spending money to attack the opponent on a personal level. But I don't know whether that'll still be the case in, say, 20 years from now. In many respects, European culture "catches up" with American culture within 1-2 decades.

The groundwork is already laid. Back in the 70s and early 80s, German parties tended to put their actual _agenda_ on their posters. Nobody does this anymore. Today, posters typically show the face of a party's lead candidate, and some catch-all slogan that's supposed to highlight popular traits of their personality. So, while we don't yet have the circus going on that elections in the US have degraded to, we _are_ eroding our political culture nonetheless.

It's not that Romney is out to get rid of public broadcasting. It's that the US currently has a $15 trillion dollar deficit and we need to make some major cuts. One of the things that will take a hit in Romney's plan is public broadcasting.

Overall, I think that there are more important things to talk about in the campaigns, for example what is each candidates plan to get 12 million people back to work.

I like to think that without their mud throwing campaigns they could have done a lot worse. I feel like the whole party and all their voters are angry people united in hate and that's why this bashing works well for them. Unfortunately I know a lot of their supporters and it's incredible how much they hate others - at the University of Warsaw one girl actually started yelling a hate speech when another student admitted being gay (during a lecture in Sociology about homosexualism). In order to cheer things up I asked her why she's okay with their presidential candidate being gay, also I told her that I've smoked grass a couple of times and asked whether that makes me evil. Long story short: she fled into a nearby church. PiS supporters are fun.

Also: Somehow the whole Big Bird thing reminds me of Ficus. Unfortunately he didn't make it into congress because of stupid racist laws.

Well, latest polls show that they are ahead of governing party right now. And what they recently did, was imho fair criticism over the govt. actions. And it already paid up.

I know that by antagonizing with Donald Tusk they got some rednecks votes, but it's not a winning strategy.

On the other hand, it wasn't this hard to criticise the rulling party and Tusk...
Also, I think more PO voters are united in hate against PiS than the other way around.

The polls show that. Most of the PO voters vote on PO because they don't want PiS to take the lead. This is why they lost so many votes in favor of Palikot without doing anything.

There are more people voting for PiS and Kaczynski than voters who choose PO. Most of them choose PO in fear and hatred towards PiS. And that "flow" won't last forever.

True... man, democracy sucks. They should really introduce an "anti-vote" per citizen. You know, everyone not voting for PiS would give them his anti-vote - so you could BOTH make sure they don't win AND vote for the party you actually believe in. And imagine what this would do in America - Reps and Democrats would all vote each other down, it would actually eliminate the two party system. ^^

The tone of these elections is just pitiful. It blows me away that the public accepts politicians that continually slander each other and act like children. The most unfortunate part is that it isn't just attack ads, either! They do it on the floor of Congress!

The question of political attack ads came up during the VP debate last week, both candidates not only skirted the question, but spent several minutes talking about completely unrelated nonsense and never really answered it. They wouldn't take responsibility for the ads they are running. At least it shows they have some shame and they are embarassed by them.

The only good side of it is, I don't know that politics has changed much in the past 200 some years. I've seen posters and ads from prior generations that were just as foolish, the dawn of the internet and TV ad seems to have just propagated them more.

I was watching a historian (can't remember which show) who was asked what would "the founding fathers" think of our politics? (I hate these types of questions/comments, but that's a tangent)

This historian laughed and said: "Are you kidding? They'd probably complement us on how much we've cleaned it up!" (paraphrase from memory)

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Here's some political humor (aimed at Mitt Romney, but it's a jest, not a barb):

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6830834/mitt-romney-style-gangnam-style-parody