In the wake of Ted Cruz’s victory in Iowa last evening, there have surfaced allegations that Cruz is running a dirty campaign. The newest allegation is that Ted Cruz’s campaign deliberately sent emails to supporters to spread false rumors at caucus sites that Carson had dropped out, so his supporters would caucus for other candidates. And after initially denying any wrongdoing late Monday, Cruz apologized and called it a “mistake.”
This is not even that terrible. As a student of Historical Politics I couldn’t help but to think back to the election between John Adams and Jefferson. Even worse, the election of 1828 between Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams.
It all began in 1796, when Alexander Hamilton, writing under the pen name “Phocion,” attacked Thomas Jefferson on the pages in Gazette of the United States, a federalist paper in Philadelphia. Newspapers then were the SuperPACs of today; the charges were not specifically endorsed by candidates, but certainly not refuted by them either.
In this case, “Phocion” claimed that Jefferson was having a love affair with one of his slaves (which, of course, turned out to be true). Phocion went on to call Jefferson a coward and extol the virtues of one Mr. Alexander Hamilton, which is kind of like Don Diego de la Vega giving glowing reviews to Zorro.
In that same election, Adams supporters also claimed that Jefferson’s election would result in a civil war, that he would free the slaves, and that he was an atheist. As for his supporters, they were “cut-throats who walk in rags and sleep amid filth and vermin.” In other words, Adams’s supporters thought that Jefferson partisans were part of the 47 percent.