When people are running for the highest office in the land, the president of the United State, sometimes campaigns can get pretty ugly. Backs get pushed to walls and desperate times call for desperate measures. It is a do or die situation for people. When that Oval Office calls your name you will do anything you can, right or wrong, to make sure you get to sit there. This was very apparent in the 2000 election with George Bush and fellow republican John McCain.
George W. Bush would go to become the 43rd president of the United States after a brutal campaign that was a fight to the finish since it began. He beat out Democrat Al Gore and Green Party member Ralph Nadar in the general election but it was the republican primaries that biggest breach of ethical persuasion.
While campaigning in South Carolina for their primary Bush had a push-poll and asked voters if they would vote for opponent John McCain if they knew he had fathered a black child. Then there were flyers dispersed that claimed McCain had a "negro child". The poll and flyers were trying to paint McCain in a negative light and make him seem like he is not fit to be president. It was playing on the racially environment of the south. False information was given out, knowingly, to persuade people. This was an extremely unethical situation.
The real situation was that John McCain and his wife adopted a child from Bangladesh. So the information the Bush campaign was giving out was adamantly false and twisted the truth to make people think differently. It is one thing to run a negative ad about a candidate when it's true. Sometimes it can seem backhanded but the truth is the truth. However as McCain’s national campaign manager Rick Davis said, a smear doesn’t have “to be true to be effective.”
Bush's breach in persuasive ethics ended up being effective because he would go on to hold two terms in office. There was blasted disrespect and offense in his claim about McCain because it made it seem negative to have a black child if you are white. He also tried to falsely paint John McCain as a bad person who did not have an ethical code.
The breach in ethics impacts the situation because it makes people vote in a certain way. They were using false information to persuade people to not vote for McCain. The argument could be made that Bush would still have won if he did not spread the rumor, however he still did it. That is a problem in politics and campaigning. It's an every man for himself do what ever you need to win situation. It sadly also shows that you do not need to be ethical to be president. You just have to be liked better, no matter what the truth is. Ethics gets thrown out of the window. This is just one example of a breach in persuasive ethics on the campaign trail.
Gooding, Richard. "The Trashing of John McCain." Vanity Fair. N.p., 31 Oct. 2004. Web. 28 Jan. 2016.
This was a notorious episode which was vehemently denied by the Bush camp. McCain, famously, confronted George W. Bush in an "aside" moment on the debate stage. This smear proved to be devastating to McCain's campaign.
ReplyDeleteThe world of politics is, as you say, dirty. Unfortunately, for most of the professionals, the industry itself represents a "zero-sum" game, wherein the only thing that matters is who is ahead in the polls on that day - that politics becomes a never-ending tug-of-war over polling numbers, and practical ends become irrelevant.
I appreciate your concern regarding the way this game is played - especially in regard to how it robs citizens of important information useful in making a responsible decision. So how, as an analyst, might you describe the problem of this apparent complacency for ethical politics? What "rule" might you assert as a guiding principle for this industry?