Negative Campaign Ads...

One of the many consequences of the typical American's ignorance of history is their perception that politics today is cruder, nastier, and more partisan than ever before.  The truth is that campaigns today are quite civil by comparison to the campaigns of yesteryear.  My introduction to that truth was reading about the Presidential campaign (including contemporaneous pamphlets and advertisements) of Lincoln versus Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell in 1860.  Anyone who knows me knows that I am a dedicated proponent of free speech – but even I was taken aback by some of those campaign materials!

What occasioned the above observations was this video, passed along by reader Doug S., that aims to educate on that same point: