The Massachusetts gubernatorial race has reached the home stretch. After more than six months of tireless campaigning, Democrat Shannon O’Brien and Republican Mitt Romney are both approaching the most crucial time in the campaign. But instead of devoting their time to convincing voters they are the more qualified and deserving candidate for the state’s most important political job, each contender’s efforts have denigrated into endless negative messages about the other candidate, with few arguments for personal merits to back them up.
The latest attacks and reprisals have surrounded all of the campaign’s major issues. After an O’Brien comment in support of gay marriage was taken out of context Tuesday, the Romney campaign accused O’Brien of changing her stance on the subject, which was only met with more accusations from the O’Brien campaign. Each candidate has also called the other’s record into question, following revelations about each of their recent professional pasts. They have called each other’s nonspecific plans for improving education and solving the state’s dire fiscal crisis unrealistic and faulty.
But neither candidate has strengthened his or her case for his or her own positions on the issues. The campaign has been dominated by negative rhetoric, rather than positive promotion of new and innovative ideas.
Though negative messages about opposing candidates do have an important place in every American political campaign, negativity should not overtake all else. While it is important for Romney and O’Brien to set themselves apart from each other, voters need to know how their stances and record will work for the state in and of themselves. During the waning days of the campaign, both candidates should focus on showing what they will do to improve the state’s health care system and financial status, instead of simply attacking each other’s vague and poorly articulated ideas. The candidates should spend more time improving their plans, rather than figuring out the most politically efficient way to attack the other’s record.
The state’s less politically interested voters do not have the desire to separate the negativity from substantive ideas. Instead of putting in the effort to understand each candidate’s merits, most undecided voters are likely to simply tune the campaign out all together. With three weeks left to convince voters of their merits, it should be both O’Brien’s and Romney’s jobs to show that they can raise above negativity and elucidate innovative ways to approach the state’s problems.
