Negative campaigining

I haven't watched tooo much TV here, but last night I caught an Obama campaign ad.

At one point in the last presidential debate, McCain responded to Obama by saying "I am no George Bush." I suppose meaning that he can't be blamed for the mistakes of the Bush administration (I'm not sure, I didn't catch that part of the debate.)

So the ad I saw last night started off with that quote from McCain, that he isn't George Bush... then the ad pointed out all of the similarities between McCain and Bush, and how McCain voted with Bush and so forth.

In other words, the Obama campaign was making the point "actually, McCain is just like Bush. Don't vote for him."

Which wasn't great, but okay.

McCain has been accused of 100% of this kind of negative campaigning. I read about one McCain campaign ad which slated Obama for approving sex-education for preschool children. Which does sound a bit disturbing, and apparently the ad made it out to be very disturbing.
What the ad didn't say was that the sex-education was completely appropriate for young kids. It was "don't talk to strangers" and "tell your parents if anybody tries to touch you" kind of stuff.

All over the news at the moment is that Palin spent government money taking her husband and kids with her on some work conference, or something like that. The way I gather it, it was funded by discretionary money so it wasn't completely out of line. But still not great.

This type of campaigning where you desperately dig up dirt on your opponent is so unappealing. Of course real corruption needs to be weeded out and if politicians have serious character issues the public would want to know about them. But they really take it to another level here. I hope we never descend to this.