DanMargarita.com

Much has been made of the vicious campaigns that Kerry Healey and Deval Patrick have run against each other, in particular Healey’s virtual assertion that Patrick spends his Friday nights playing poker with rapist friends.

A recent program on PBS was a documentary on Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, which used a voiceover read straight from his diaries. While chuckling at the irony of his insistence that his people “stay the course,” I found myself realizing that while Hitler was a dictator, he was actually elected to office. Of course, I am in no way equating either candidate with Hitler or the Nazis, but it makes me wonder how many of us bother to learn a candidate’s positions instead of voting by party. After all, Hitler pretty much made himself clear when he wrote his autobiography Mein Kampf in the 1920’s. No, I haven’t read it but I know enough about it to know that it wasn’t exactly ghost written by Mahatma Gandhi.

I figure that somewhere in Germany in 1933 somebody was standing in a voting booth and thinking: “Achh, zees people is all ze same. Hmmmm…Hitler…zat’s an interesting name. Luv ze mustache. Vot ze hell, I’ll vote for him.”
More likely, they thought it in actual German and not in a vaudevillian, pigeon-German accent.

I can’t also help but wonder what kind of a campaign Hitler would conduct if he were running for office today, using modern campaigning methods. As for negative campaigning, I think that’s a given. Yet, what kind of a negative campaign could Hitler’s opponents run? What could you possibly accuse Hitler of that is as bad or worse than what he actually did? Sure, they could accuse him of anti-Semitism, but wasn’t that probably part of his campaign platform anyway? Anything bad they could say about him, he might think of as a badge of honor. If pictured as the sociopath and madman that he was, his campaign might even try to spin it in his favor with slogans like:

“Hitler: He’s Nuts for Germany.”

Leaking rumors about one’s opponent has become a staple of modern campaigns. That fact that Hitler was alleged to have one testicle would certainly be fodder for the tabloids. No doubt, his opponents would let that get out but his campaign might simply rework the prior slogan to:

“Hitler: A Nut for Germany.”

Conversely, Hitler might try to sling mud at his opponents but since we know what he stood for and believed in, one can only assume that he would think that saying nice things about his opponent would be his idea of mud and would derail their campaign.

“Josef Schmidt: He doesn’t want to commit genocide and rule the world. Is that the kind of man we want to rule Germany?”

Before I vote, I’d better read Healey and Patrick’s campaign literature and make sure that neither one has promised to invade Poland.