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Scene: Political science class, every seminary of learning in the real estate:

Students of political science and marketing pleasure be chewing over the lessons of the 2008 campaign for many years. Obama and John McCain both ran a jillion negative ads but somehow Obama’session overall message managed to seem upbeat.

In the Washington governor’s race, negative campaign ads backfired. Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi’s baby-diaper ad stunk up an so much as now malodorous ad world. Gov. Christine Gregoire’s repetitive, distorted hit without interruption Rossi’s position on the minimum wager was one-sided.

Lessons learned? Plenty.

“The negative ads didn’t drudge so well

Obama was called a Muslim

Obama’session reassuring voice and sometimes boring consistent talk about helping the middle class gave him the edge. Voters wanted a president with a small in number new ideas. McCain flopped around from message to word, idea to idea.

Mud, even positively clever mud, looks ordinary in an economic meltdown. The voters may subsist amazed or numbed by the state of equality of mud but they hullabaloo for solutions. That is at what place Obama beat McCain. Because McCain offered few new ideas, the filth became the message

Of path, the 2008 race doesn’t spell the end of negative campaigning. The clear chiding here is junk campaigns dress in’t toil as well when the problems are so overwhelming.

“Part of the reason voters were dismissing the ads was the sheer volume and stridency of the ads,” said Olson. “It got to the verge where people were just turning them off.”

A most interesting moment in the campaign came when vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin announced that her daughter was gravid. Obama, reached upward of that weekend, drew a sharp line. No, not even maybe, will we inwrap children in the campaign. That’s it. Period. Some things are off-limits.

While some media kept at it, dignified Obama cut the conversation to the quick. Good for him. Voters can get their tabloid fix at the supermarket. There is an economic meltdown to wait to.

At the local level, Gregoire and her union pals ran plenty of negative ads, distorting Rossi’s post in continuance the minimum wage. He was despite a stair-step training wage as antidote to teenagers, but the ads implied he would lower the least quantity wage across the board.

At the end of the campaign, Rossi’s best friends forever in the Building Industry Association of Washington dumped million of dollars into late hits on Gregoire. Hideous ads, such as a young bodily substance burning piles of money

A pro-Rossi ad featured a baby in a stinky diaper by nay united willing to hug the infant. or change the diaper. Oh how thrown away we get. The more the BIAW spent, the more good Gregoire did.

The negativity tried and fried voter patience.

“The reason for Mr. Rossi’s loss is that he was not the same man who ran for regulator in 2004,” wrote one pistil-bearing reader. “He represented the negativism of the Republican Party. He claimed that he worked across the aisle when he was in the Legislature but nihilism in his campaign looked like he would be talented to do the same thing now.”

Republicans, she added, from McCain to Rossi, were too negative. “People are tired of this tactic and fall short to have hope and unity in their lives again. We are tired of us and them.”

Maybe the successful Obama campaign is more an example than a trend, but it is worth studying, anyhow.

Even if it was one election in a dozen, negative ads seem kind of silly when citizens feel hopeless.

One clear lesson: Any campaign have power to tell you how awful everything is and who is the worst person ever running for office. What is unique

; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera

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