A Brief History of Rough and Tumble Politics, with Roger Stone | Big Think

A Brief History of Rough and Tumble Politics, with Roger Stone

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U.S. politics has never been kind and genteel. Anyone who believes otherwise is wrong. It's always been a game ruled by its most aggressive players. Roger Stone would know; he'd be the first to admit he's one of them.

The reason why this current political climate feels more brutal than ever is because political rhetoric has effectively harnessed the Internet. From newspapers to television to Twitter, politicians and their operatives are masters at innovating new ways to attack their opponents via new media. Even though most people like to look down upon negative attack ads, research suggests they work. The voters aren't interested in facts — they're interested in emotion. Campaign negativity satiates that thirst. It's what the people want.

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ROGER STONE:

Roger Stone is an alternative historian who was one the legendary American Republican political consultant who has played a key role in the election of Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. Stone also served as an assistant to Senator Bob Dole. Stone is the author of "The Man Who Killed Kennedy — the Case Against LBJ" (Skyhorse). Stone is also the author of Nixon's Secrets, a broader look at the rise and fall and rise and fall and final comeback of Richard Milhouse Nixon.

Stone has also chronicled men's fashion for the New York Times and the Daily Caller. His annual "Ten Best and Worst Dressed" list has been featured on the Huffington Post and the New York Post since 2009. Stone serves as Men's Style Correspondent for the Daily Caller.

A Goldwater zealot in grade-school after a neighbor gave him Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, Stone was elected Young Republican National Chairman in 1977. Stone was appointed Chairman of Youth for Nixon for Connecticut by Gov. John Davis Lodge who would become Stone's mentor. Stone was the youngest member of the staff in President Richard Nixon's re-election camping in 1972, the notorious CREEP — Committee for the Re-Election of the President. At CREEP Stone would fall under the tutelage of the legendary Murray Chotiner, Nixon's early campaign manager and the inventor of negative campaign advertising and tactics. In 1973 Stone went to work for Senator Bob Dole as a staff assistant and travel aide...

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TRANSCRIPT:

Roger Stone: Politics in this country is not beanbag. It has always been rough and tumble. It’s always been a contact sport — when Abraham Lincoln was running, his opponents had handbills saying that he was a half-breed; he was a mixed race, for example. So all that’s really changed is the technology. Now we use the Internet. We use television. We use cable. In those days, we used newspapers, we used handbills. When William McKinley ran for president, his campaign manager, Mark Hannah, was the first guy to realize that he could print hundreds of thousands. if not millions of flyers and distribute them to the 50 states. Since people didn’t have reading material and the newspapers were generally passed from person to person and they moved across the country. You’d finish reading a newspaper; you wouldn’t throw it out. You’d give it to somebody else. They would read it; they would pass it to somebody else. Newspaper printed in New York would find their way all the way to California because newspapers were rare and people wanted to read them. And all the newspapers were partisan. You were either hardcore Democrat or hardcore Republican.

And if you were in either party you would print the most scurrilous, negative, vicious attacks on the other party. So it’s always been a part of our society. Now the very same voters who tell pollsters I hate negative ads; I hate the negative tone — those are the same voters who could tell you exactly what was in those ads because they’ve absorbed them. They particularly absorbed them on the basis of the high level of repetition that most professional political consultants now realize is necessary. Think of it this way. When I was growing up, there were three television networks. I grew up here in the New York area so we had ABC, NBC, and CBS. And then we had two independents — WPIX and WNEW. That was it. All the other channels on the dial were snow; they were nothing. Meaning that if it didn’t happen on one of those five channels, it didn’t happen at all.....

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