Why is is that most of the political ads were we have been exposed to over the past two years have been mostly negative? The unfortunate answer is that US has along history of mud slinging, which dates back to our founding fathers.
This has been the most expensive presidential campaign, but certainly not the dirtiest nor nastiest.
In 1800 President John Adams and Vice-President Thomas Jefferson—the two highest elected officials in the land and each a pivotal player in the creation of our nation squared off in a race for the White House and established a tradition of negative campaigning that would cause our current candidates to blush with embarrassment.
The mud-slinging we experience in modern elections, the dirty words, back in the earliest days of the nation, was often left to pit bull surrogates. One such surrogate was the influential President of Yale University, a John Adams supporter, who publicly suggested that were Jefferson to become the president, we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.
Not to be outdone by the Federalist president’s attacks, Jefferson had a few negative narratives of his own to say.
A particularly stinging attack came via James Callender, who was an influential journalist at that time and whose incendiary pamphlets had been secretly funded by Thomas Jefferson and who had an axe to grind for having been prosecuted and imprisoned by the Adams Administration for violating The Sedition Act, legislation designed to protect America's participation in war.
Callender wrote that Adams was a rage-full, lying, warmongering fellow; a repulsive pedant and gross hypocrite who behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditic character.