TailOverTeaKettle.com

A week ago, I wrote about the characterization of Bush as one who runs a smear campaign.

• Kerry’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, said the video "demonstrates two things: the Bush White House is going to run a gutter campaign, and their worst fear is a Democratic nominee named John Kerry." Bush’s camp should stop "wasting time sticking their nose in a Democratic primary and engaging in smear tactics." (USA Today)
• Kerry: "I promise you that when the Republican smear machine trots out the same old attacks in this election, this is one Democrat who will fight back." (USA Today)

Seemingly unrelated, according to the news media, negative advertising is well underway. As a Yahoo! news story reported this week(Kerry, Edwards Both Lead Bush, Poll Shows), the non-DNC Democratic ad machine is well underway:

A liberal-leaning online group that is running television ads criticizing President Bush says it has raised $10 million for its advertising fund. The total for the MoveOn.org Voter Fund doesn’t include the estimated $1.5 million from financiers George Soros and Peter Lewis.

The group currently is spending $1.4 million to run an ad in West Virginia, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio and Florida that takes Bush to task for the Iraq war and shows a polygraph machine reacting as Bush is heard saying sentences such as "Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program."

The group also is running radio ads in Maine, New Mexico, Kentucky, Tennessee and Iowa, urging citizens to call their representatives in Congress to ask that they censure Bush for what the group calls "misleading the nation into war."

Don’t forget that this was the same organization that sponsored the contest containing such satire as that Bush is Hitler.

A very nice summary of the situation by Charles Krauthammer (It’s not GOP’s slime machine you hear) includes the following:

And now, after six weeks of carpet-bombing Bush, the Democrats are shocked — shocked! — that the Republicans might answer back with "negativity."

What, in fact, have the Republicans mustered? A single Internet ad about Kerry, the Senate’s king of special-interest money, denouncing special interests. And one speech by the Republican National Committee chairman on Kerry’s conventional liberal (i.e. budget-cutting) positions on defense and intelligence.

The Republicans have yet to go after Kerry on his most critical vulnerability, his breathtaking penchant for reversing course for political convenience.

Maybe all we can say is that ’sleazy’, ’smear’, and ‘gutter politics’ are all in the eye of the beholder.