So much for that 'respectful campaign'

-- by Dave

One thing I, in all my travels here -- Americans want a respectful campaign. They do, they want it. Now, people say, well, negative ads move numbers. They may. But do we have to go to the lowest common denominator? I don't think so.

John McCain, July 2008

So the latest WSJ/NBC poll (the same one showing Barack Obama's lead slipping away) also shows that Americans think John McCain is running a negative campaign:

By a nearly six-to-one margin, voters say Republican presidential candidate John McCain is running a negative campaign against his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Nearly three in 10 voters, 29%, pointed to McCain as the candidate running a negative campaign, compared to just 5% who said Obama is running a negative campaign. McCain’s 29% rating is the highest of any one candidate in the previous two presidential elections according to the WSJ/NBC News survey.

Know what? They're right. It's not just their opinion. It's a quantifiable fact.

The other week the Boston Globe created a word pile (click on the graphic to see it full size) analyzing the words being used by the two campaigns and teasing out which were used the most, and in what connotation. Obama's campaign, as you can see, is largely about Obama, and it's overwhelmingly positive. McCain's campaign, like a mirror image, is likewise all about Obama, and it's overwhelmingly negative.

It wasn't exactly by accident that his high-school classmates dubbed him "McNasty."

[H/t to Silent Patriot.]

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]