It’ a matter of personal integrity…

I’m not naïve.  I know how campaigns work.  I have been working in them since I was 14, and I know how the calculating, the spinning, and the “bending the truth” tactics work.  I’ll admit that I’m fairly good at them, when given the opportunity.  Ironically enough, I learned a little about some of these concepts from a book my father gave me for my 24th birthday, a book on governmental relations, an arm of the Public Relations field.  A book that sits on my shelf to this day.  A book called “Lipstick on a Pig.”

I don’t know that I have been as angry at a campaign as I was this last week.  The whole “lipstick” smear by the McCain campaign was disgusting.  When even Bill O’Reilly calls a Republican tactic “unfair” and “irresponsible,” you know something is wrong.  Straight to the point: they are lying to you, us, and anyone else vulnerable enough to hear their messages.  It sickens me.  THIS is what they come up with against a candidate who made it explicitly clear to his campaign that the subject of Gov. Palin’s family was strictly off limits?  A man who has so unwaveringly stuck to the issues and refused to play in the gutter-ball politics of the Karl Rove operatives? Lipstick is what they can come up with?  Paul Krugman of the New York Times said it best: “they’re all out-in-out lies.”

When I returned to the office I am volunteering at after hearing of the McCain “Lipstick” smear, I ranted and raved a little bit before I could calm down and my hands stopped shaking.  I told the woman who is supervising me, “If our campaign were to ever start abusing the system, abusing the voters, in a manner like I just saw, I would quit.”  She quietly looked back at me and said,

“I think we all would.”

Sen. Obama is a man of integrity, and he has proved it over and over again in the way in which he has ran his campaign.  Rather than working to disenfranchise voters, scaring them away from the polls as we saw shadowy figures doing in 2004 and we already anticipate in this election, Sen. Obama’s campaign has set up “voter protection” networks that work to make sure that every legal voter gets to vote, and that every vote is counted.  It is almost bipartisan in its simplicity.  Except that we acknowledge that many of the voters that the Republican party would prefer not show up at the polls, the urban, the working, the poor, those who are most susceptible to intimidation, happen to vote Democrat.

So after a long, long week, in which the Obama campaign got battered around pretty badly in the news and in the polls, all for non-issue stories, I had to ask myself:  what sort of personal integrity do these people have?  To knowingly and willingly lie to the American public about your opponent’s comments.  Not just distort, but LIE about them.  To operate to disengage the citizens of a state from voting, using scare tactics and (once again) lies… What type of person works for that campaign?

As for me, I couldn’t do it.  As a matter of personal integrity, I could agree with everything my candidate says and what s/he stands for, and yet I would still walk away from any campaign that pulled this shit.

It doesn’t mean Im not tough enough.  Because I am.  It means I am better.  It means WE are better.

Let’s just hope the American people can see that.