Negative Campaigning

AS THE presidential race heats up, the campaign rhetoric will do the same. So don't be surprised if by the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November some pundit calls this presidential race the dirtiest in American history.But American political campaigns have been steeped in negative campaigning since the 19th century, when candidates created their own newspapers for the purpose of spreading dirt on their opponents.In 1828, for example, President John Quincy Adams was forced to suffer the scurrilous campaign libel that he and Mrs. Adams had had premarital sex. Then there was the 1852 presidential race involving Franklin Pierce, described by opponents as "the Fainting General" of the Mexican War.According to one campaign attack, General Pierce "tumbled from one horse just as he was getting into one fight . . . fainted and fell into the opening of the second . . . got sick and had to go to bed on the eve of a third, and . . . came pretty near getting into a fourth, missing it by only an hour."

Democratic gubernatorial candidate American Joe Miedusiewski will begin airing his second radio "attack ad" today, a 60-second spot that accuses party front-runner Parris N. Glendening of "exaggerating his resume."Although unstated in the ad, Mr. Miedusiewski, a state senator from Baltimore, said the allegation refers to Mr. Glendening's claim that he was a police commissioner when he served on the city council of Hyattsville in 1973 and 1974. Mr. Miedusiewski contends Mr. Glendening was nothing more than a liaison with the police force on budget matters.

THE FIRST ACT of Campaign 2000 will soon be over, except for the hoopla of the summer's political conventions. Although marked by some negative campaigning, the stage that has been set for the fall's presidential campaign is one on which the candidates' leadership potential has moved to the front. The voters' assessment of that -- not slogans, labels or mud-slinging -- will ultimately decide the outcome of the November election. For the post-Clinton era, the search is on for a president with the commitment and vision to lead an America that is optimistic about the future, yet troubled by some aspects of the present.

DAVID KING of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government argues that "voters who show up for primary elections are more ideologically extreme than their general election counterparts." In addition, he says, primary elections are often dominated by the preferences of party activists. These facts account for some of the more salient "surprises" in Maryland's primary Tuesday, such as first-term Del. Verna L. Jones' more than 2-1 victory over incumbent Sen. Clarence M. Mitchell IV in the Democratic race for the 44th Legislative District.

Washington. -- A Bush strategist, evidently mystified, said wonderingly, ''He went up to New Hampshire and the bottom fell out.''What's the mystery? President Bush, becoming strident, incoherent and preposterous, finished this New Hampshire campaign flexing Arnold Schwarzenegger's muscles, whining about negative campaigning and misrepresenting his last New Hampshire campaign.''I never did take the pledge,'' Bush said plaintively, referring to the no-new-taxes pledge in New Hampshire in 1988.

WASHINGTON -- As voters continue to demonstrate their disdain for the tone of political campaigns by staying away from the polls in droves, the debate goes on within the political community about who's to blame.Alex Castellanos, a Republican consultant involved in the Bob Dole campaign in 1996, told CNN recently that "coverage of politics has been very cynical" and that the news media is "the most negative institution in American politics today."He is not alone in that view. A recent survey of 196 professional political consultants active in national campaigns in the last three election cycles provided this not too surprising answer about whose fault it is that politics is held in such low regard: Don't look at us.The poll of 200 consultants, slightly more Democrats thanRepublicans, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, pointed a collective finger instead at the news media, the voters themselves and, in some cases, at the candidates.

In a victory for free speech and free-wheeling political campaigns, William E. Brock defeated Ruthann Aron a second time yesterday when a Maryland jury decided he did not defame her in the 1994 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate.An Anne Arundel Circuit Court jury of three women and three men found that what he had said about Ms. Aron a week before the primary when he told reporters that juries had "convicted" her of fraud was neither false nor defamatory.Legal experts and political consultants said an Aron victory might have had a chilling effect on First Amendment guarantees and what candidates could say about their opponents.

Political campaigns that are in trouble abound in sweet talk in public and bitter ironies in private.Here are some of the ironies that the George Bush campaign has been kicking around recently:Once upon a time, George Bush was a brilliant debater. In 1988, Bush won those two debates with Michael Dukakis, didn't he?Well, not really. When you go back and look at the videotapes of the 1988 debates you realize that Bush was not that hot a debater.He looked, in fact, no different than he looked in the debates of 1992.

PERHAPS THE best tribute to former Republican National Chairman Lee Atwater has been the fact that most stories about him following his tragic death at 40 did not pull punches. They noted, accurately, that he was one of the most intense, and effective, gut fighters in American politics and a devoted disciple to the art of negative campaigning.Having said that, it should be noted at the same time that Lee Atwater was not a hater, not in the sense that he was driven by an excess of bile toward the individuals he targeted for defeat.

WASHINGTON -- Lee Atwater, the brazen, hardball political fighter who managed President Bush's 1988 campaign and went on to chair the Republican National Committee, died early yesterday morning after a yearlong battle with an inoperable brain tumor.The 40-year-old South Carolinian died at George Washington University Hospital at 6:24 a.m., just over a year after he collapsed while delivering a speech in Washington and was diagnosed with an aggressive, cancerous tumor.President Bush, in a statement released yesterday, said he and Barbara Bush "lost a great friend in Lee Atwater.