Titles are far more important to me than they are to most writers. Often I can’t write an article until I’ve got the title in mind, and then the piece just pours out of me.

Anyway, the title that the editors of the Indianapolis Star gave my piece in today’s paper is “Candidates go negative in ploy to look virtuous.” It’s my long promised reaction to the Foley scandal and a few other uses of hypocrisy in this year’s campaigns.

Candidates go negative in ploy to look virtuous

by Jeremy Lott

It used to be an absurd example and a perennial favorite of political science professors. Candidates “go negative” because it works. Why? First, because some voters will believe the allegations. Second, candidates can do only one thing at a time. Force an opponent to spend time and money rebutting the charges and he can’t use those scarce resources to argue for his platform or criticize your record.

“For instance,” the professor would say, “two candidates are in a public debate that allows them to ask questions of each other. When it’s the incumbent’s turn, she ties her opponent in knots by demanding to know, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’”

It’s no longer much of an exaggeration. In Indiana’s 7th Congressional District, Rep. Julia Carson found herself in a hard fight for re-election against businessman Eric Dickerson. She released evidence that Dickerson was arrested in a domestic dispute in the early 1990s that included allegations of spousal violence. Carson justified the charges by saying that Dickerson had “been running as Mr. Righteous.” He had it coming.

The Carson-Dickerson race is nastier than most races for Congress this year, but not by much. In another incident involving a candidate’s spouse, several supporters of Virginia Sen. George Allen stomped all over a heckler who had asked the senator why he had spit on his first wife.

In Connecticut, Rep. Chris Shays responded to charges of Republican corruption in the Mark Foley scandal by bringing up Chappaquiddick. And until former Rep. Gerry Studds’ death, Republicans were quick to point out that Democrats had refused to remove their colleague from office when he was caught in an affair with a male teenage page in the early 1980s.

To make sense of all the shouting, we might do well to look at the third, often overlooked reason why politicians go negative: They want to look good.

I blame the voters for this. We want politicians who are virtuous, but virtue is a hard thing to measure. Often the easiest way to create the appearance of virtue is by playing the part of righteous critic.

Broadly speaking, the two parties have opposite approaches for how to do this.

Republicans are classic hypocrites, and I hasten to add that I don’t mean that as an insult. They argue against ideas and usually attack only those lapses by opponents that are already public knowledge ( “My opponent is too liberal for this district, she wants to cut and run in Iraq, and she voted to let Bill Clinton/somebody else off the hook”).

Democrats are classic anti-hypocrites. They want to argue more with motives than ideas. Like Carson, they are more likely to think that the private foibles of opponents are fair game. Why? Because those private actions often go against the values that their opponents have espoused.

California Sen. Barbara Boxer first won election to the Senate in a close race by revealing that her opponent had visited a strip club. Carson claimed Dickerson was representing himself as “Mr. Righteous,” when, in fact, in her words “he beat his wife to a pulp.” (Dickerson’s wife denies this.)

Assigning blame for this year’s electoral slugfest is not easy, but the anti-hypocrites do look suspiciously like the kid who threw the first punch. Even if you don’t think that civility in politics means playing with kid gloves, you have to wonder how much these volatile allegations of private vices have to do with the issues that affect voters.

Even more troubling is the way in which righteous anti-hypocrites have framed their attacks on opponents. It has helped to make light of the real vices that they’re charged with.

Take the Mark Foley scandal: What was worse: (a) trying to seduce a teenage page; or (b) working to stop people from using the Internet to prey on young children? If you answered (b) then I weep for my country.

Jeremy Lott is author of In Defense of Hypocrisy.