Election Scandals and Smear Campaigns from 1884 and 2008

“Rake, Libertine, father of a bastard, a gross and licentious man, a moral leper a man stained with disgusting infamy” (Boller 149). These words written by the New York Sun and the New York Tribune in 1884 are indicative of the mudslinging and smear campaign instituted by the Republican Party when the Grover Cleveland illegitimate child scandal rocked the presidential campaign of 1884. The previously stated smear campaign instituted by the Republican Party was designed to discredit Democratic hopeful Grover Cleveland, by debunking his truthful and honest persona (which the majority of the American population associated with him at that time). In this election the smear campaign proved ineffective because the Democratic party (After Cleveland admitted the accusations were true) decided to redirect the campaigns focus, by stating that “the real issue of the campaign was public integrity, not private misconduct (Boller 148). The illegitimate child accusation or scandal has proven, for the most part, to be ineffective in the 21st century with a bit of an exception in the 2000 Republican primaries. In 2000 during the Republican primaries in South Carolina the Bush campaign decided to accuse presidential hopeful John McCain of fathering an “illegitimate black child”, after Bush lost to McCainin the NewHampshire primary. http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/000311.html. In this instance the accusations were without merit (McCain had adopted the child in question from Bangladesh and Mother Theresa). This accusation hurt the McCain campaign in 2000 and was a contributing factor in McCain’s loss of the Republican nomination. In 2008 McCain has actually hired some of those same people responsible for the stories concerning his “illegitimate black child “in 2000 to win the vote in South Carolina. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/banks
It seems to me that both Cleveland and McCain know how to turn a scandal into a win.