Look, You Jerk, Negative Campaigning is Unethical!

[Warren Dew]

But he was also very charismatic and, well, black, so he won the black vote because blacks voted for his race, not his politics, and they swallowed hook, line and sinker his vague promises of "change" and "hope" without asking what kind of change he had in mind...until it was too late.

I agree with the rest of this post, but the black vote has been solidly Democrat for half a century. They would have voted for Clinton just as strongly, and older blacks supported Clinton over Obama in the primary. Obama's race did help him, but it was among the guilty conscience white vote, not among blacks who would have voted Democrat anyway.

Take away the ability of the Communist elite to simply kill anyone who disagrees with them or bothers them and China would shed Communism like a dirty pair of underwear and return to Capitalism in a heartbeat, just like Russia did.

China shed Communism as an economic system long before Russia did.

[Svartalf]

In other words, democracy doesn't work.

Republican forms of government don't work... Athenian style democracy used to, so long as the number of citizens was low and they did have time to spend dealing with government matters.

[JimC]

At the end of the article, it suggests that when people get sufficiently fed up with negative campaigning, they'll make that disgust known either by writing to the candidates or at the poll booth on election day. Politicians, like most of us, will do whatever analysts say works best. They'll keep doing it until it stops working for them, and whether or not it works for them is up to the voters. I don't think we should blame the politicians for doing what has been shown to work; I think we need to blame ourselves for letting it work.