Reporting by: Tyler McIntosh | Photograph by Gavin Jackson

     The 2008 presidential election will be remembered for a lot of things. It was an election of firsts, for both parties. Sarah Palin would have been the first female vice president, John McCain would have been the oldest president at 72-years-old, but ultimately, though, Barack Obama became the first black man elected as president of the United States.
     The 2008 presidential election may also be remembered as the time a campaign took things too far.
     It started out innocently enough on the Republican side. In the early going of McCain’s campaign, speakers at rallies made sure to emphasize Obama’s middle name, Hussein, to get Republican crowds in a frenzy. Associating Obama with Saddam Hussein or the Muslim religion may have been dirty, but it was hardly the worst thing ever done on the campaign trails.
     These types of tactics grew worse.
     It was not as if only low-level workers made ethically questionable statements against Obama. On Oct. 4, Palin accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists” in reference to Obama’s unspecified relationship with radical Bill Ayers at an Englewood, Colo., campaign stop. Palin stuck by these statements days later when she said Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.”
     Second Vice Chair Sandy Halem, the office manager of the Democratic Party in Portage County, said such comments go beyond presidential mudslinging.
     “I don’t think we have anticipated or seen some of the things in a modern election like people using the terms ‘traitor’ or ‘killer’ at a rally,” Halem said. “You can disagree with issues, but you can’t attack someone’s race or religion. That’s the kind of thing we had a long time ago in this country. We do not want that to continue. That’s not part of the American dream.”
     So why does it seem that McCain’s followers campaigned more against Obama than they campaiged for their own candidate? The reason, according to Richard Deeley, a self-proclaimed, die-hard Republican, is fear.
     “I don’t think it’s right, but if you can get more votes for your guy by making voters scared of the other guy, then that’s what you do,” Deeley said. “Lets face it: Obama’s a black guy who has a name that sounds Muslim. A lot of people, even Dems, are scared of that.”
     With party leaders making severe accusations against the competition, it should come as no surprise that crowds at McCain-Palin rallies seemingly became less pro-McCain and more anti-Obama. The mention of Obama’s name was met with accusations of terrorism, treason, a myriad of racial slurs and even death threats.
     In anticipation of such events, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, assigned Secret Service protection to Obama in May of 2007. It was the earliest the Secret Service ever issued a security detail to a candidate. This was in addition to the private security force Obama hired himself.
     Another reason for the barrage of negative campaigning could have beendesperation. Obama’s lead continued to grow against McCain in almost every poll imaginable. And just two weeks before the election, on Oct. 13, CBS News nationwide poll showed Obama ahead of McCain, 53 percent to 39 percent. Similar polls showed Obama ahead in nine of 16 “battleground” states.
     “I think anyone who attacks someone personally is desperate,” Halem said. “It has backfired in the polls for McCain; you can see that very clearly. People think his ads are much too negative. You only get a rise from your most loyal with ads like that.”
     All the negativity is causing politicians such as Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and Sen. Sherrod Brown to take notice. On Oct. 20, the two made a joint speech in Columbus against the use of negative campaign ads.
     Halem said that as far as she thinks, the Democratic Party ran a campaign based on truth.
     “In many cases these are rumors or outright misrepresentation of facts,” Halem said. “We simply give people facts … When somebody comes in and makes a uniformed remark that they heard from a Republican candidate or a Republican commercial that implies that our candidate is something other than a Democratic, Christian senator, then I have to reply that anything else they have heard is simply untrue.”