Keep it nice for election season

It’s an election year and the mud, as always, is flying thick and fast. Presidential elections are usually nasty affairs, with candidates throwing the kind of insults at each other that would get them invited to step outside if they were said to a stranger in a bar. He’s a bigot. She’s a crook. He’s a philanderer. She’s a murderer. And worse.

Ugly election rhetoric is nothing new; in fact, it’s sort of an American tradition. Thomas Jefferson, whom we think of as a stately, well-spoken man, famously accused John Adams of having “a hideous hermaphroditical character” in 1800. Adams’ command of insulting language was even more impressive; he called Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

The precedent set, future campaigns sank pretty low. Andrew Jackson’s marriage was legally somewhat shaky, and his opponents slandered his wife so badly that she died before his inauguration of a heart attack that was almost certainly aggravated by the campaign. Grover Cleveland had sired a child out of wedlock years earlier; opponents chanted “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” at his rallies. Warren G Harding’s opponents in 1920 put out the rumor that he had an African-American ancestor, which means little today but would have been the kiss of death at the time. (DNA testing in 2015 showed that he did not.)

In more recent times, we’ve been loudly urged to vote against Tricky Dick, Slick Wilie, and Barry “Hussein” Soetero. A few candidates have conducted themselves like gentlefolk and refrained from these tactics, but darn few. When you throw your hat in the ring, you pretty much expect your reputation to get dragged through the barnyard.

This year, however, the rhetoric has taken on a new dimension as the ubiquity of the Internet has brought the battle to the individual voters. What used to be a duel has become a free-for-all on social media, and is slopping over into the real world. Here in the Basin, it’s mostly been limited to campaign signs being stolen or defaced, which is bad enough. But on the national level, we’ve seen full-blown riots in cities where Donald Trump was due to speak and politicians warning of violence and possibly revolution if Hillary Clinton is elected. Which raises the question: what do we do next year for an encore?

The Herald has never endorsed a political candidate and we’re not about to start now. There are good reasons for this. One of them is that unlike a big-city or national paper, we serve a small tight-knit community where partisanship can lead to alienating readers. But in addition, we have no wish to add to the amount of hostility in the air.

We understand that many people are passionate about politics. That’s a good thing. A healthy republic depends on involved citizens. But it’s important to draw a distinction between the political and the personal. Politics are not real life.

In January we will inaugurate a new president, and for the most part, not a whole lot will change. Whoever wins is going to be limited in what they can do under our system of checks and balances. Millions of people will not be deported, nor will Sharia law be implemented. What will remain is the rancor and ill-will generated by people who are convinced that the opposing candidate is evil incarnate and, worse, blame the people who voted for them.

We encourage our readers to remember, when talking politics, that they’re talking to their neighbors. The person you trash-talk today may well be the person you share a pew with or wave to over the back fence for years to come. Candidates come and go, but the community remains. By all means, let’s campaign vigorously for our side, but let’s keep it polite and fair, and when it’s all over, let’s put it behind us and move on with no grudges. We’re all Americans and we ought to act like it.

— Editorial Board