Campaigns are the conversation of democracy, and the one that just concluded was angry, deeply personal, powerfully ideological and exceedingly negative…. Many experts worry that negative advertising reached new highs — or lows - in the 1994 [U.S.] campaign and only insured that the voters would remain angry and cynical about their politicians… Still, many scholars and politicians argue that incremental reforms are unlikely to truly change the nature of the political debate. Campaigns do not happen in a vacuum, they say “Why should people expect politics to be any different from the rest of the culture?” asked Representative Barney Frank,

Democrat of Massachusetts. “It's not as if politics is deteriorating but everybody's watching Shakespeare “ Mr. [Thomas] Mann also noted that anger and cynicism are not unique to the United States. “I worry a lot about the fraying of the civic culture, but we have to understand what is going on around the world,” he said. “There's a lot of undifferentiated animus toward elites, suspicion of government and politics and an unwillingness to strike out.” Angry times, in other words, breed angry campaigns. What is less clear, however, is how the cycle ever ends.