The latest batch of White House tapes and documents from President Nixon detail campaign planning to tar opponents with various guilts-by-association. Ugly stuff, it’s true. But is it rare stuff, as insinuated in the AP story (whose author, I’ll wager, is likely not old enough to remember Nixon)? The surprise in all this data is that, for all the public hand-wringing that’ll go on about Nixon’s campaign, nearly everything he did then goes on today. Even harsher. Even more often.

Combing through records of contributors for criminals? Oh, yeah. What candidate has NOT had to return a donation over just that problem during the last ten years? Tying one’s opponent to gay rights as a negative? You bet–and it’s not just a right-wing thing: for instance, remember John Edwards’ ham-fisted “compliment” in ‘04 about Dick Cheney’s gay daughter.

It goes on and on like this. Anyone with a casual acquaintance with modern campaigning will tell you: When it comes to this sort of thing, Nixon not wasn’t out of the mainstream. In fact, compared to the 24/7 smear factories that both parties (and the mainstream media, especially–and the left-wing blog world) run these days, Nixon was a piker.

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