American national politics has devolved to the lowest common denominator.  Don’t vote for the other guy.  I wouldn’t have known about this but for watching cable news this morning, since I’m in New York.  Nobody bothers to air television commercials in New York, as we’re a lost cause. 

The campaigns are being waged elsewhere.  When I traveled south for Parents Weekend at my daughter’s college a couple weeks ago (she’s doing great, thanks for asking), I got to see campaign commercials.  It was jarring, since I hadn’t seen them before.  One after another.  Sometimes, the same commercial would appear three or four times during a half hour on the same channel.  Clearly, someone lacked good executive function skills.

But this mornings news was that the gloves are coming off for the last 30 days.  No discussion of which candidate has the better plan to provide health care, though Paul Krugman has a good op-ed on that today.  Nobody is talking about how they are going to fix the economy, as no one has a plan for that.  Rather, it all comes down to why the other guy is evil.  John McCain has a new add entitled “Dangerous”.  Barak Obama is going for erratic, with an undertone of senile dementia. 

While a rant on the evils of negative advertising would not be inappropriate at this point, I can understand why the great minds running these campaigns are doing this.  It’s all about the undecided voter in the swing state.  They understand something that those of us who follow the news, think about issues, consider the options, do not.  They understand that the undecided voter is too stupid to convince positively, and at best will respond viscerally to the negative.  The best they can hope for is to scare the undecided voter away from the other guy.

The swing voter has been glorified in the past, mostly not to offend stupid people by telling them that they are stupid.  No one wants to hear that.  it makes them feel angry.  They don’t believe they are stupid, and believe that they are every bit as smart and rational as everyone else.  It’s just that they find all this incredibly boring, and not worth their time.  Plus, they are so close to getting a gold star on Super Mario Smash Brothers that it would just ruin the game to stop now.

In the process of persuading the undecided voter that the other guy is evil, many of us will be put off by the overt negativity, not to mention the outright deception.  We’re told that to turn a blind eye to all this, because “our guy” has to win the election first to do the great things he plans to do.  There’s no doubt truth to this, but it stinks.

If only we could find unity in one single point across the political spectrum, that negative campaigning is the refuge of scoundrels and reflects worse on the person offering it than the person getting it up the wazoo.  Of course, it’s likely that we could largely agree with this and get behind it, regardless of whether one leans left or right, except for one relatively small group in this great nation of ours.  The undecided voters.  They just don’t care enough.