THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION- The politics of your guy is worse than mine

[NJmaverick]

Has anyone noticed there has been a change in the way politics is being discussed. It's the concept (that has been championed mostly by the Republicans) that my guy may be bad, but your guy is worse. The idea is you don't defend your favored candidate. You pay lip service to the idea that your candidate isn't perfect, then you go after the opposition like gang busters. Beyond that, they try to claim a superior personal position of, "I am not a blind partisan, like you are" because they paid lip service to their candidate's faults.

It seems to me this is an extremely destructive, disingenuous and counter productive way of discussing politics. First off, the who is worse debate, is usually won, not by the better candidate, but rather by the person with the louder and nastier backers. It's how an election between someone of Al Gore's caliber and a loser like George Bush was close enough to steal. It's how a 4 year screw up was able to win the election of 2004 over a better alternative.

This tactic is destructive for 5 reasons.

1) It prevents honest and productive national discourse, and discussion turn to personal attacks (when the partisan and bias charges start to get tossed around).

2) It prevents and proper evaluation of political candidates, as there is no longer any comparison or good examination of the candidates and their positions.

3) It allows seriously flaws to be over looked (like Bush's lack of intelligence or good judgment) because it gets shouted down by the list of minor or often exaggerated or made up flaws being trumpeted by the seriously flawed candidate's backers.

4) It serves to distract the public from the real and important issues, that should be the measuring stick of who a candidate should vote for.

5) It increase the effectiveness of and encourages fear mongering

Beyond these issues, this technique also prevents our nation from learning from its mistakes. After all if the person they put into office proves to be a major disaster (like Bush) the person's backers simply blame the other side for "not putting up a good alternative" (ignoring that they were the ones that actually created that false impression).


So have others seen this change? If so, how do we combat it? How do we get the political discussion and discourse back to something more productive?