The problem with McCain's negative campaigning.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

There is nothing inherently immoral about negative campaigning. Pointing out bad things your opponent has done and reasons they're unfit for office is a perfectly legitimate and in no way dishonourable campaign tactic.

Dishonest negative campaigning *is* inherently immoral, but the reason is that it's immoral it because it's dishonest, not because it's negative. Arguably, telling nasty lies about someone else is worse than telling nice lies about yourself, but it's still the lying that makes it wrong.

Of course, between the poles of "clearly honest" and "clearly dishonest" there's a wide grey area of "spun" and "exaggerated" and "technically accurate but misleading".

McCain's campaign "went negative", as a conscious decision, but not to an exceptional extent compared with past campaigns; Obama's campaign made it look more so because it involved unusually little negative campaigning (although by no means none).

The problem with McCain's negative campaigning was that, if you're going to make your opponent's negatives the focus of your campaign, you've really got to find enough negative to make that worthwhile, and McCain didn't manage that. He wasn't able to attack Obama himself; all he was able to do was to attack some people whom Obama had losely associated with in the past and since denounced.

To get anything out of them, McCain had to exaggerated desperately - which played badly with the electorate in itself - and even then, he didn't really come up with anything bad enough to put people off. He had to fight increasingly dirtily, making himself look bad, and even then, he wasn't really able to get much purchase.

The lesson to learn is not "negative campaigning is wrong", but "negative campaigning comes with a cost; make sure that there really are enough negatives out there to make it worthwhile before resorting to it."