Perspective: Negative campaigns can be constructive when true

TALLAHASSEE -- Thomas E. Dewey will forever be known as the man who wasn't elected president. Almost everyone thought he would be. Then Harry Truman whistlestopped around the country, bad-mouthing Dewey's Republican buddies in what he called the "do nothing" 80th Congress and earning the nickname "Give-em-hell-Harry."

"I never gave anybody hell," Truman said later. "I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."

That was, of course, a negative campaign, but one that illustrated the useful role that a negative campaign can fulfill. There may be countries where politicians say only nice things about each other, but no one would call them democracies.

It is unfortunate that negative campaigning is now earning such a bad name. It seems to work, which is why there is so much of it. But if the time comes when nobody believes it, we will have lost an irreplaceable tool for keeping politicians accountable.

Negative campaigning is constructive only when it's true. Otherwise, it destroys, disinforms and frustrates intelligent consensus on public issues. Often, it is a tool in the hands of forces larger than the candidates themselves, forces that have no scruples against playing the voters for fools.

Florida's ugliest campaign at the moment appears to be the Democratic primary in the 3rd Senate district, which sprawls across all or part of 11 counties. It includes parts of the capital, making it a big prize symbolically.

The major candidates are State Rep. Janegale Boyd of Monticello, who's backed by big business; former Leon County Sheriff Eddie Boone, who has the trial lawyers in his corner; and Rep. Al Lawson of Tallahassee, who has stayed out of the crossfire, is trying to be his own man, and has the least money to show for it. Lawson is expected to make the runoff with the help of a large black vote; the question is who will face him.

It's war between the trial lawyers and big business, and as in any war, truth is the first casualty. Most of the offending ads are running independently of the candidates, financed by shadowy front groups that, at least for now, can keep their membership and funding sources secret. Boyd, who asked her allies to pull one dubious anti-Boone ad, has been getting the worst of it. I think she's wrong and the trial lawyers are right on such core issues of suing HMOs and other big businesses. But the tactics of the lawyers' front that calls itself Florida Consumer Advocates Inc. are too foul by far.

The trial lawyers were nowhere to be seen in the environmentalists' uphill fight against last session's Great Land Grab bill, which would have given away as much as 500,000 acres of wetlands by essentially moving the public's claim from the high-water line to the low-water mark alongside lakes and rivers. Boyd was one of 70 House members to vote for it. It was a truly bad bill, one of the worst ever, bad enough to need no exaggeration. But that is what the trial lawyers do when their ad claims the bill would have closed off flowing waters. However, to the extent that private claimants fenced off previously public shorelines, it is true, as the ad says (emphasized with a picture of man in handcuffs), that one could have been "hauled off to jail just for coming ashore."

"I was out canoeing this summer in New York, which is a low water state, and you go past a "no trespassing, private beach, don't get out of your boat' sign every 100 feet," says David Guest, an attorney for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund in Tallahassee.

Because the "Consumer Advocates" ad flaunts a half-truth, it is also half-false, which helps Boyd and her supporters defend the wretched legislation. If the trial lawyers mean to make an example of a pro-business legislator, they should at least show some professional respect for the truth.

As a nurse who works for Humana, Boyd is vulnerable to conflict of interest charges over the questions of patients' rights and suits against HMOs. But that's not enough for "Consumer Advocates," whose flyer attacking Boyd on that issue quotes out of context lobbyist J. M. "Mac" Stipanovich's memorable benediction to the 1999 session: "I don't know what the poor people got, but the rich people are happy and I'm ready to go home." Stipanovich represents nursing homes, not HMOs.

The same quote appears over his name and under her picture on a frightful mailer accusing Boyd of having "invited criminals into your home" by voting to sell "personal, private" driver's license information. The bill, since repealed, actually dealt with selling driver's license photographs to a database intended to help merchants verify the identity of people cashing checks. Again, Stipanovich had nothing to do with it.

The foulest ad in the series accuses Boyd of voting "to allow anyone from out of state to bring a concealed weapon into Florida," including, perhaps, "divorced fathers bent on revenge against an ex-spouse." The law actually applies only to people who hold concealed weapons permits in other states. That's hardly synonymous with "anyone."

Unregulated, unreported money pays for these "independent" expenditures. It is truly the root of evil.

Tallahassee plainly needs a fair campaign practices committee like the one in Pinellas. Probably every community does.

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