DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

During this year's primary election campaign, the term "mudslinging" was thrown around with abandon.

For instance, KLAS reporter Edward Lawrence had this to say after the votes were counted in the race for the Democratic nomination for governor: "Now the party must rally together for the general election. With all of the mudslinging in the primary, will Titus get an endorsement from Gibson and count on his supporters to follow her?"

Mudslinging? Neither candidate accused the other of having adulterous affairs. They restricted their campaigning to legitimate issues. Jim Gibson was critical of Dina Titus for voting to increase taxes and her own pension. Titus was critical of Gibson for his coziness with a developer and Nevada Power. For their trouble they were accused of mudslinging.

Have we reached a point where candidates cannot even criticize the public record of opponents without being accused of mudslinging?

Candidates have an obligation to draw attention to the record of their opponents. Had Titus and Gibson not raised these issues, they would have been letting down their supporters and failing to inform the voters.

The primary also provided evidence of how little voters mean when they say they are against "negative campaigning," however it is defined.

In the Republican primary for the U.S. House of Representatives in district 2, Sharron Angle was the first one off the mark with negative television spots.

She has denied this. She says that Dean Heller was the first to attack. It is true that Heller was the first candidate to run attack spots. Her attack spots were run not by her own campaign but by the Club for Growth, the D.C. political action committee that invented her candidacy. But that's like drawing a distinction between the ventriloquist and the dummy.

As the Nevada Observer noted, "That might be considered just a game of semantics since supporters of Angle, but not her own committee have been running ugly ads calling both of Angle's competitors 'Liberals,' a term that ultra conservatives reserve as if it were a four-letter word."

After Angle's attack spots started running, her opponents Dean Heller and Dawn Gibbons both held off on responding in kind, and they paid a price for it. Both of them had at different times led in opinion surveys. Under the constant barrage of Angle's spots, they both started declining. As many candidates before them have learned, negative spots that go unanswered are believed by voters.

Finally Heller struck back at Angle, running attack spots of his own. But he didn't stop there. Those spots also contained attacks on Gibbons. He began regaining the lead.

Gibbons did not respond to either Heller or Angle. She kept pushing the issues she wanted to run on and ignored the other candidates. It can be argued that she went far beyond responsibly avoiding negative campaigning. She told voters why they should vote for her, but did not tell them why they should vote for her in preference to Angle and Heller. The voters were entitled to more information than she provided. She didn't have to use the kind of mean-spirted negative campaigning that Angle and the Club for Growth used in order to draw a sharp contrast between her and her opponents. It is possible to fight back without fighting dirty.

Nevertheless, the voters had the choice they always say they want -- a candidate who was unwilling to use negative campaigning. And they responded by deserting that candidate. Caught in a crossfire of attack ads by Angle and Heller, Gibbons dropped into third place in a race she had once dominated.

To the very end she kept talking about issues and never mentioned her opponents in her television ads. "But they sure mentioned me, didn't they?" she said whimsically after the primary. She gave the voters what they say they want.