This Is Not That Rough A Democratic Primary

In 1992, Bill Clinton started running negative ads against Paul Tsongas and Bob Kerrey in New Hampshire. The Republicans this year have been running negative ads since Iowa. Heck, even in 2004 Gephardt and Dean went nuclear on each other early. The history of Presidential primaries is not a game of patty-cake.

At one New York City debate late in the 1984 race, Walter Mondale and Gary Hart battered each other so relentlessly that Jesse Jackson almost needed to physically separate them. In an especially heated 1992 encounter, Bill Clinton appeared ready to lean over and deck Jerry Brown.

The nominating system, by its nature, encourages such ferocity. Because the leading contenders usually differ only modestly on issues, they are compelled to exaggerate their differences and to magnify any blemish they find in their opponent's character or career.

Yet the only negative ads in the Democratic primary so far ran for a day until both sides yanked them. By historical standards, this has been an unfailingly nice primary, and only recently have tempers flared. There have been some whispers from surrogates, some opposition research dropped into the papers, and some out-of-character behavior from a former President, but in general, that's politics, and it's not being played at a particularly cutthroat level. And Barack Obama seems to understand that this is a slap-fight compared to what we'll see in the fall from the Republicans.

At a morning press conference, though, Obama indicated that the race wasn’t as nasty as some may think, "I don't feel like the candidates are being blooded up," but then added on, "This is good practice for me, so ya know when I take on those Republicans I'll be accustomed to it."

The media is trying to push a narrative that this is the nastiest Democratic primary in history, and that it's causing an irreparable rift within the party that will never be patched up. They love the conflict and they're writing breathless articles about how the Clintons are "double-teaming" Obama and how everybody hates each other and the fate of the Democratic Party hangs in the balance.

I just don't buy it. The only thing nasty about this primary is the coverage of it, which has over-hyped every back-and-forth charge, and in particular over-hyped this so-called "rift." It's like the media heads into every campaign season as a tabula rasa, without the memory of any past performance in other primaries.

I know people get very emotional and the blogosphere reflects this emotion, but don't get suckered. Nobody's ruining the Democratic Party here. In my experience observing a caucus last week in Nevada, everyone was happy to vote for their candidate, and the high turnout was certainly being driven by a desire to return the White House to the Democrats. This idea of a rift is a game being played by the traditional media, who wants a storyline.

UPDATE: Let me just add on to this with an awesome story of a train ride, from Open Left.

So then the guy sitting behind me starts making phone calls on his cell. He's got a fairly loud and authoritative voice, so I can't help but overhear, and he's making call after call after call to tell various people that we've gotta find a way to beat McCain, just would be just awful, and going on and on about how much McCain sucks and that even having Hillary or Obama would be better than having McCain because he would just be horrible for the conservative movement because he just doesn't get the movement and he's always using liberal language to talk about things and how that's a terrible thing. And in one conversation with one person he was talking to, he was trying to talk him into coming out with a terrible story about McCain from five or six years ago, and he's like yeah, what he did to you was just incredible, and you should go public with that story, etc.

After a while I got up to go get something from the café cart, and it turns out the guy sitting behind me was Rick Santorum, which makes it all the more fun and all the more interesting.

The real rift in the primaries, which is in the conservative movement, is endlessly more fascinating than the media-hyped one in the Democratic Party.