Even historians aren't buying the 'sleaziest campaign in history' canard

Historians, not a right-leaning group, agree that McCain's attacks on Obama are par for the course.

David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief strategist, said Sunday that John McCain is running the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history.” It was a line trotted out all weekend by various Obama staffers as part of an effort to portray the Republican nominee as a purveyor of the slimiest tactics in recent memory.

Yet presidential historians and political scientists interviewed by Politico scoffed at the notion, suggesting McCain’s approach is no harsher than those used in previous modern campaigns and certainly not by comparison to many historic campaigns.

Remember the daisy ad LBJ used against Goldwater? And I'd forgotten these ads from 1984. A great source for viewing historic ads is The Living Room Candidate, a site that has up all the presidential ads since 1952. Stroll down Memory Lane and revisit some of these ads.