OPINION: Dirty campaigns dishonor our system

Michael Dawidziak has been a political consultant, strategist and pollster for more than 30 years.

This year's political season goes down as the nastiest ever.

OK, that's true every year. Campaigns continue to get worse and worse, and 2010 set a high-water mark (or is that a low-water mark?) for negative messaging in campaigns.

Voters think they are immune. A recent News 12 Long Island question of the day was, "Do personal attacks in campaign ads influence your vote?" The results? Yes, 35 percent; no, 65 percent. But those saying "no" were almost certainly answering a question that wasn't asked. They probably meant they don't like personal attacks. The vast majority of voters, however, are influenced by them.

Ask political consultants and they will tell you, "If attacks didn't work, we wouldn't do them." Ask candidates who've been on the receiving end, and they'll tell you emphatically: They work. That truth is painfully evident when they knock on a voter's door to be met with, "Oh, you're the guy who wants to take away my Social Security!"

When a candidate runs for public office, he or she really has only two basic messages: 1) Why you should vote for me, and 2) Why you shouldn't vote for my opponent. Telling the voters why they shouldn't vote for your opponent is, by definition, negative - but it doesn't have to be nasty.

Former Town of Islip Councilwoman Pamela Greene - who also happens to be my wife - says that when she first ran for office in the 1980s, it was a question of convincing voters which candidate could run a better railroad. Now, she says you have to convince voters that the other guy is running a corrupt and dangerous railroad, and if you ride on it you and your family will die.

It's the personal nature of the attacks that's gotten so out of hand. Any registered voter in Nassau or Suffolk is familiar with these mailings - the unflattering pictures that make the opponent look like Freddy Krueger, with the same evil motivations and ethical standards.

There used to be a certain civility in campaigns. They used to go negative only at the end, and only if the candidate was significantly behind. Now the rule is, "Define your opponents before they have a chance to define themselves." Candidates go negative right from the start and keep it up until Election Day.

All of this comes at a price. Pundits and elected officials decry the ever-declining number of people who actually vote, but nobody points a finger at nasty political tactics. Negative campaigning is designed to turn off votes. If done right, it turns off more of your opponent's votes than your own - but there is truth in the old saying, "You can't throw mud without getting some on you." Some pundits were predicting a record turnout at the polls this year but, though the final tally won't come in until the elections are certified after the recounts, there appears to have been no significant turnout increase here over 2006, the last gubernatorial year.

While it may sound like a cliche, it's important to ask: What kind of message are we sending to our children? As we struggle to teach them that cheating is wrong and that, say, athletes who use steroids to get an unfair advantage are not to be emulated, we lower the bar for the very people who should be held to the highest standards: those we elect to represent us. But do we really have a right to expect from them a willingness to lose, rather than stoop to dishonest and malevolent campaign tactics?

You bet we do. If we are willing to sacrifice the truth and decency in the name of winning at all costs, how are we ever going to get kids to esteem our system of government, or even want to participate in it? In the end, the victims of the nasty personal attacks go far beyond the single person targeted.

The 2011 campaign season is already under way in some places. It's time to demand better of our candidates.