The Tradition of Politics

‘There’s been a lot of discussion over the last several days about how this campaign gets so negative, how we get distracted, how we exploit divisions,” Mr. Obama told voters in Reading on Sunday afternoon’ (Seeyle, Zeleny). Reports from The New York Times portrays Senator Obama as developing a more rigid tone and firing back at the Senator Clinton with the race for the democratic nomination getting close. According to The New York Times, Mr. Obama goes on record calling Mrs. Clinton; a compromised Washington Insider wherein she fires back by describing “his message of hope had given way to old-style politics and asked Democrats to take a harder look at him”
Not only are we trading negative remarks, the Election of 2008 also seems to be racking up quite a heavy spending with an estimated 20 million has the figure of expense come next Tuesday. The New York Times reports, “Mr. Obama will have spent more than $9 million on television and Mrs. Clinton will have spent almost $4 million” (Seeyle, Zeleny). There no doubt that campaigning is costly but the trail has also attracted many new and fairly young voters with “the field operations of both campaigns adding 327,000 Democrats to the voter rolls, many of them 18 to 34 years old” (Seeyle, Zeleny).
From our discussion of Susan Dunn’s historical work on the political career of Thomas Jefferson we can bear witness to similar tactics being used today that were branded by the old party machines.