Negative campaigning can take many forms but there appears to be a real penchant at the moment for the vote-for-us-or-suffer approach. The big name here – and in many ways the modern pioneer – was Dick Cheney for his remarks to a post-9/11 US electorate that the danger of a John Kerry presidency was "that we'll get hit again".
He has his followers in the most unlikely places. Romano Prodi, former European commission president and leader of the centre-left challenge to Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, told French voters at the weekend that a no vote on the EU constitution referendum would result in the "fall of Europe". Tony Blair's fondness for talking up the link between a few hundred Liberal Democrat votes and a return to the Tory era is just another point on the spectrum. Clearly some focus group somewhere is saying it pays to make the stakes higher.
The galling thing here is that the big choices approach obscures other the big choices in an election and minimises such items as a policy programme. Martin Samuels, writing in today's Times, observes that it is only swing voters in the most marginal constituencies who are being campaigned to in the British general election, something Peter Oborne's Channel 4 documentary last night (blogged here) blamed on the use of databases such as Karl Rove's Voter Vault to pinpoint the voters and narrow policies needed for victory. No wonder there are only big choices for the rest of us.
