Say Anything Blog

Some of the candidates in this year's Presidential election may employ some hard-ball tactics, but we can assume they're not going to be plying voters with booze:

This was especially true of the winner in that 1758 race, who ordered his election agent (campaign manager, in modern terms) to get his hands on as much liquor as he could and to pour it into vats at the polls and to make sure the voters drank heartily before casting their ballots and---most important---to make sure the voters knew who had sprung for the refreshment.

It worked. The gentleman in question, whose name was George Washington, not only won election to the Virginia Assembly, but went on to a career of some distinction in American politics. Analyzing the results of the campaign more than 200 years later, the historian W.J. Rorabaugh writes: "For his 144 gallons of refreshment, Washington received 307 votes, a return on his investment of better than two voters per gallon."

Isn't it nice to learn what savvy politicians our founding fathers were? But strange tactics didn't end in the 18th century, as this lesson in semantics tells us:

And then there were the linguistic dirty tricks of the 1950 U.S. Senate race in Florida. George Smathers (search) criticized his opponent, Claude Pepper, because Pepper's sister, according to Smathers, was a "thespian." Not only that, Smathers said, Pepper's brother was "a practicing Homo sapiens." Further, Smathers charged that Pepper himself had gone to college and openly "matriculated."

Smathers won the election.

So before you get all cynical about the smear campaigns being run during this year's election remember that there is no such thing as the good old days in politics. Its always been a nasty business.