WHAT: “Four more years ... of Lincoln?”
WHEN: 1864/2012
WHO: President Lincoln (R) vs. Gen. George McClellan (D)
BACKGROUND: The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania has created a series of fictional attack ads imagining what tactics used by modern day political strategists might look like during the 1864 presidential race. Kathleen Jamieson, director of the center, speculates that such a negative campaign – portraying Lincoln as unpatriotic, a heretic, a tax-and-spend bureaucrat, and responsible for every casualty of the Civil War, could very well have resulted in a victory for McClellan, who, she said, “would have been by far the worst president in our history.”
