Hitting Below the Belt

You wake up, put on your bunny slippers and walk out to the end of the driveway to get your morning paper. After getting back to the kitchen, you pour yourself a cup of coffee, take a bite out of a blueberry danish, and open the paper. You're hoping for a good read as the following headline catches your attention: "Sen. Johnson Tied to Think Tank."

You continue to read because, you think, if it made the front-page, it must be important. However, you soon realize that the most interesting thing about the story is the glob of blueberry filling that dripped on the page. It's just another baseless attack below the belt from those who oppose the belabored Senator.

Of course, I've made up this scenario. There is no Sen. Johnson, and you never would have retrieved your newspaper in those old bunny slippers. You also wouldn't have let blueberry goop drip onto your paper, especially when the comics were on the next page. That would be sacrilegious! However, the point is well-taken. Every day, we are bombarded with "news," and it turns out to be nothing more than another personal shot aimed at someone who is in the limelight.

This is a time-honored tradition. In fact, in 18th Century America, it was much worse. Nothing was sacred, and no one, including President Washington, was immune to some pretty scathing attacks from the opposing party. At that time, editors of newspapers did not pretend to be non-partisan. They made it abundantly clear what they stood for and were very proud of it. One might wish our current newspapers would follow that lead instead of pretending to be different. We do kind of live with this open secret today, don't we?

Perhaps the most notorious exchange of attacks came between Alexander Hamilton and Gov. George Clinton of New York. Hamilton and Clinton had been at each other's throats for a long time, mostly due to differences of opinion regarding the Constitution. Their dispute was carried out mostly through New York newspapers with Hamilton's brilliance as a writer usually making Clinton look like a fool. Clinton, unable to match wits with Hamilton on an intellectual level, did what any good politician would do under the same circumstances -- hit Hamilton below the belt by personally attacking him.

Prior to Hamilton's writing The Federalist Papers, Clinton wrote a series of articles calling him a "Tom Shit," a then popular caricature of someone who is uppity without "proper breeding." He assailed Hamilton for being a bastard by birth and accused him of being a "mustee" which was someone of mixed racial ancestry. Clinton went on to accuse Hamilton of being a supporter of the Crown who worked for the King. According to Clinton, Hamilton was in progress of returning America to England.

Hmmm... attacking your opponent by questioning his allegiance to country, his birth, and his race. Aside from bringing up his religion, this all sounds pretty familiar. One need not look any further than the last presidential election to see all of this playing out in front of us. We had the Republicans questioning Obama's birth, nationality, allegiance to country, and religion. We had the Democrats knocking McCain by making fun of his age, and they pounced on Palin with ferocity. We even had poor "Joe the Plumber" get raked over the coals by the Democratic machine.

Even though people on both sides of the aisle were screaming protests, this was nothing new to our political and editorial heritage. People have and always will hit below the waist.

Why? Well, this is a practice that goes back to the beginning of history. If you are in a debate, and you fail to win over the audience with your intelligence, discourse, and research, you do the only thing you can do to win -- punch your opponent in the groin and walk away the victor. They don't teach this in school, but we learned how to do it as children on the playground. Somehow, though, we never did quite learn how to stick to the issues. Although cheap shots are not official rhetorical devices, we innately know that they are equally effective at winning over the audience.

This bring me to my point. The problem isn't with the politicians who engage in such behavior. The problem is with the audience. You see, if Clinton weren't able to get positive feedback from New Yorkers from his lambasting of Hamilton's race and allegiance, he wouldn't have stooped to that level. But, he knew he would win over supporters, so he did it. And, hey, call it what it is -- if the Democrats knew that making fun of Palin's wardrobe shopping spree wouldn't work, they wouldn't have gone there either.

To be good at hitting below the belt, you have to know the political landscape and the way your audience thinks. If you guess wrong and hit hard, it can come back to bite you. Case in point, the Republican's focus on Obama's associations with some not-so-patriotic folks back in the '70s. Perhaps that shot would have done well eight years ago, but it actually backfired on them this go-round.

So, the lesson to our children will once again be, if you want to be powerful, you've got to walk tall and carry a big stick (that you use to knock your opponent to the ground by hitting him hard in the kneecaps).