TALK OF NEGATIVE CAMPAIGNING SEEMS TO IGNORE REALITIES OF POLITICS

"Politics ain't beanbag," said Mr. Dooley many years ago.

You wouldn't know it by listening to today's media weenies, who apparently want to turn it into just that, along with hopscotch, marbles and ring-around-the-rosie thrown in for good measure.

Is there any subject on which more claptrap is uttered than on the now ritualistic denunciations of negative campaigning? I don't think so.

The irrepressible Nicholas Von Hoffman, a columnist for the New York Observer writing in The Wall Street Journal, offers some useful corrective to all the nonsense about negative campaigning purveyed on what "is said on those dull PBS roundtable programs." Herewith, some excerpts from Von Hoffman's lament:

"No one is left to remind us that many of the greatest political orations of classical antiquity were denunciations.

"Demosthenes' attack on Phillip of Macedon was so completely destructive that the word philippic was coined to give a name to an utterance of a totally devastating character. For centuries schoolboys read them in fascinated delight. Cicero's series of philippics denouncing Mark Anthony were so negative that Anthony caused Cicero to be assassinated, his head cut off and hung by the tongue on the rostrum in the Forum.

"Since Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton, our politicians have resisted shedding blood when their opponents have gone negative and instead contented themselves with replying in kind. Nowadays, though, the goo-goos will give you a censorious squint for doing so much as that. ...

"If Teddy Roosevelt had had to operate under the sweet rubrics of today's political etiquette he would have burst a blood vessel. H.L. Mencken, the most negatively acidic and funniest political writer of the century, would clap a hand over his mouth and head for the commode if he had to deal with our saccharine ways. ...

"You might say Americas' been fuzzing out for some time now. The rootin' tootin' American man went out of fashion years ago as the country moved away from fists and toward anger management. Fifty years ago soft-and-fuzzy would have been an incomprehensible phrase; now we demand it of our politicians.

"... We have become a nation of exposed nerves and easily bruised skin, a nation of sweetie pies. Look at the Great Seal of the Republic. The war eagle has been replaced by a Muppet." Von Hoffman is right. Study the campaigns of the early days of our Republic and you'll find every personal denunciation in the book.

Jefferson was denounced in the most appalling terms. Lincoln was ridiculed mercilessly as a fool, a baboon and worse.

Politics is a full-body contact sport. It was ever thus.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.