This past Sunday in the magazine, Adam Davidson argued that, for all the surface discord that characterizes the Obama and Romney campaigns, the candidates hold surprisingly harmonious views on the economy. They back similar policies on free trade, Social Security and welfare. Perhaps their biggest disagreement centers on slightly different tax rates for corporations and investors. "For someone who lived in the first 150 years or so of this country," Davidson wrote, "it might be hard to see what's so different about the economic policies of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney."
Compared with the founding fathers, Obama and Romney could be mistaken for running mates. When Alexander Hamilton proposed the establishment of a central bank, Thomas Jefferson countered that Hamilton's system "was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic." Jefferson drew a stark line between his views on government debt and Hamilton's. "I would wish the debt paid tomorrow," Jefferson wrote in a letter to President Washington. "He wishes it never to be paid."
Hamilton, in turn, wrote that Jefferson, the "quiet, modest, retiring philosopher," would be unmasked as "the intriguing incendiary, the aspiring turbulent competitor." He warned that Jefferson's attempts to dismantle his banking system "would be one of the most wanton and flagitious acts that ever stained the annals of a civilized nation."
Their feud engulfed the nation's first newspapers. Jefferson arranged a sinecure that paid $250 a year to the editor of The National Gazette, which ran scathing attacks on Hamilton. "Can any attentive reader of that Gazette," Hamilton wrote, "doubt for a moment that it has been systematically devoted to the calumniating and blackening of public characters?" For his part, Hamilton secured loans and printing contracts for The Gazette of the United States, where he published his own scathing rebuttals under the pen name Catullus.
The debate between Jefferson and Hamilton (and Catullus) stemmed from a deep ideological divide that took decades to heal. Today a consensus has formed in support the government's biggest economic programs. Politicians have the luxury of debating lower-stakes issues, like the finer points of the tax code or the fate of Big Bird. As a result, attack ads like this one might actually be seen as a sign of progress:
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