Campaigns & Elections: Campaign ads: deja vu all over again?

With tough attacks flying back and forth each day, this year's presidential contest is already the dirtiest in American history. Right?

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Well, may be not.

A peek into the history books shows us that venom on the campaign trail is nothing new.

It started in 1796. It was a campaign that featured handbills, pamphlets and articles in party newspapers that "denounced, disparaged, damned, decried, denigrated and declaimed," according to Paul F. Boller Jr.'s book "Presidential Campaigns".

That year supporters of John Adams accused presidential rival Thomas Jefferson of religious heterodoxy and condemned his dangerous sympathy for the revolutionary French, with all their "guillotines" and "terror." (So when Republicans this year say that the Democratic nominee "looks French," it's downright quaint by comparison.)

Jefferson's supporters did their share of sniping, too, labeling nemesis Adams a "monarchist"--a tough charge in days when monarchy was a sore subject.

Partisans then did not have the 30-second television ads, targeted direct mail, automated call centers and 24-hour cable news channels that are used today to amplify negative messages. But they used the tools they had--print materials and word-of-mouth--with a vengeance.

The prickly tone of 1796 turned even nastier and more personal, in the 1800 the race that pitted President Adams, a Federalist, against Vice President Jefferson, leader of the rival Democratic-Republicans, for the young nation's top job.

Adams was called everything from a fool to a criminal. Claims were made that he wanted to marry off his son to the daughter of George III, creating an American dynasty under British rule. Even Alexander Hamilton, a prominent fellow Federalist, ripped into Adams, saying his defects of character made him unfit to hold office. A furious Adams lashed back, calling Hamilton, the nation's first treasury secretary, "the greatest intriguant in the world--a man devoid of every moral principle-a bastard."

Federalist campaigners accused Jefferson of being a cheat, a fraud, a coward and a robber. One went so far as to call the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father ... raised wholly on hoe-cake made of coarse-ground Southern corn, bacon and hominy, with an occasional change of fricasseed bullfrog."

Hoe-cakes? Fricasseed bullfrogs? And some people complained about John Kerry being ridiculed for putting Swiss cheese on a Philly cheese steak?

The slanderous attacks of 1800 make the TV ads of 2004 that feature economic statistics and issue flip-flops seem dignified by comparison.

Throughout our nation's history, vicious attacks have dogged presidential politics.

When President John Quincy Adams used his own money to buy a chess set and a billiard table, political enemies charged that he had installed "gaming tables and gambling furniture" in the executive mansion.

Detractors also said Adams pimped for Czar Alexander while minister to Russia.

In the 1828 election, when Andrew Jackson challenged Adams for re-election, the "Hero of the Battle of New Orleans" was called a bigamist, slave-trading drunk and blood-thirsty murderer who enjoyed killing. Jackson's mother was called a "common prostitute" and his wife an immoral adulteress.

Attacks on presidential aspirant Abraham Lincoln were equally personal and mean, employing epithets like "ignoramus," "despot," "fiend," "buffoon" and "butcher" against him. One newspaper said he looked like a horrid wretch, "fit evidently for petty treason."

In 1884, Republican rebels said that their party's presidential nominee, Maine Sen. James G. Blaine, "wallowed in spoils like a rhinoceros in an African pool." Party regulars responded in force, calling the Mugwumps "Snakes," "Mutineers," and "Political Hermaphrodites."

Blaine's Democratic opponent, New York Gov. Grover Cleveland, was described as a "gross and licentious man" who was "worse in moral quality than a pickpocket, a sneak thief or a Cherry Street debauchee."

Arevelation that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child--a matter of truth that Cleveland readily admitted--provided explosive ammunition to that era's partisan spinners. "Ma! Ma! Where's my pa?" went one GOP rhyme. To which Democrats answered on election night, "Gone to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Vile charges, ugly characterizations and exaggerated claims have long marked--and marred--our nation's politics.

What we're seeing in this year's election is nothing new. Only a little tamer.

COMMENTARY BY RON FAUCHEUX

Ron Faucheux is contributor-at-large for Campaigns & Elections magazine. For his ongoing handicapping of elections nationwide, see The Political Oddsmaker on the Web at www.campaignline.com.