• Ann Arbor News, Monday, October 23, 2006 11:30 AM

As the Michigan gubernatorial campaign between Democrat Jennifer Granholm and Republican Dick DeVos gets nastier by the day, Eastern Michigan University professor Edward Sidlow, who studies American politics, notes that negative campaigns are as old as the Republic--and they can often be very effective.

There are plenty of studies showing that this works, and "the negative messages simply make for better theater. Everybody gets some sort of perverse pleasure about hearing something gossipy or nasty about someone else," he says.

Sidlow adds that we've lost sight of the fact that it is not new. In the presidential election of 1860, "Lincoln was called an ugly wretch and a baboon. Earlier, James Madison was referred to as Thomas Jefferson's "political pimp." Newspapers of the day, he notes, suggested that Alexander Hamilton was of mixed-race parentage, and mocked him as "a common bastard."

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