Letter: What negative campaign?

There has been a barrage of criticism following the launch of the UNC’s “No Rowley” campaign with one social commentator referring to it as the “descent into the muck of perso­nal vilification” and another describing it as “unprecedented”. 

But is there justification behind such condemnation of this political strategy? How many of the critics have actually visited the website to discern whether what has been posted is malicious or fair political comment? In the study of political communication, strategies which seek to expose the defects of an opponent’s programmes and policies are referred to as “negative campaigning”. 

The term itself may be a misnomer since it encompasses not the methodology involved in the campaign per se, but the message which it seeks to highlight, which is the negative attributes of a particular candidate. The fact is that negative campaigning as a political tool, is as old as the hills. Local and international politics is replete with examples of the usage of negative campaigning as a means of winning votes simply because social psychological theory suggests that negative information can sometimes be more persuasive than comparable positive information.

During the 2012 US Presidential election, President Barack Obama had utilized an advertisement campaign titled “We’ve Heard It All Before” which was a specific and sustained criticism of his opponent Mitt Romney’s economic record as a former US Governor. 

This is the very Obama who had run the well-known optimistic platform of “Hope”, “Change” and “Yes, We Can” in 2008. In response, Romney himself launched a campaign entitled “Obama hates religion”, an attack of Obama’s health care policies.

In the UK during the run up to the 1997 general election, the Conservative Party ran a campaign which sought to expose the Labour Party as dangerous by using posters of Labour leader Tony Blair with "demon eyes". There are numerous other examples of negative campaigning in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Latin America.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the PNM in 2001 ran a campaign around the theme “Save TT” which targeted perceived corruption of the then Government. In the last THA Elections the infamous “Calcutta Ship” sought to portray the UNC in a most negative way. So too, has been the sustained campaign we have come to know as the “emailgate”, which was a specific assault on the UNC leadership.
 

Today, one political aspirant hosts weekly news conferences in which he talks about plant-like substances, bribes and visitors to the private residence of the Prime Minister. Some of these recent efforts have left the realm of negative campaigning and have entered the domain of scandal and defamation.

It is unfortunate though that in the face of stinging insults leveled at the Prime Minister that the nation has not benefited from similar criticism from the self-proclaimed political scientists and commentators in our midst.

Respectfully 

Ashvani Mahabir
Cunupia