Was There A Watershed Moment....

Yes... the watershed "moment" was the election of 1796... the campaign between John Adams and the Federalists and Thomas Jefferson as the Democratic-Republicans.

The damn Federalist won... but we all know they were High Falooting wealthy scumbags who really wanted a Monarchy.

If you read the old campaigns (which were far more personal and downright nasty)... you will see that things have never been better than they are now.

That year supporters of John Adams accused presidential rival Thomas Jefferson of religious heterodoxy and condemned his dangerous sympathy for the revolutionary French, with all their "guillotines" and "terror." (So when Republicans this year say that the Democratic nominee "looks French," it's downright quaint by comparison.)

Jefferson's supporters did their share of sniping, too, labeling nemesis Adams a "monarchist"--a tough charge in days when monarchy was a sore subject.

Partisans then did not have the 30-second television ads, targeted direct mail, automated call centers and 24-hour cable news channels that are used today to amplify negative messages. But they used the tools they had--print materials and word-of-mouth--with a vengeance.

The prickly tone of 1796 turned even nastier and more personal, in the 1800 the race that pitted President Adams, a Federalist, against Vice President Jefferson, leader of the rival Democratic-Republicans, for the young nation's top job.
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Adams was called everything from a fool to a criminal. Claims were made that he wanted to marry off his son to the daughter of George III, creating an American dynasty under British rule. Even Alexander Hamilton, a prominent fellow Federalist, ripped into Adams, saying his defects of character made him unfit to hold office. A furious Adams lashed back, calling Hamilton, the nation's first treasury secretary, "the greatest intriguant in the world--a man devoid of every moral principle-a bastard."