What Cost Winning

Do we want politicians in office who will do anything to get re-elected. Classic techniques oftern used are:
1. The smear campaign - wherein a rumor is spread, true or false, and the candidate is put on the defensive.
2. Guilt by association - a variation of the smear campaign wherein a candidate is connected to a falsehood due to some vague association with it that is not part of the story.
3. Whisper campaign - this can take many forms including spreading rumors about an opponent such as he or she is retiring or that his or her name is connected with the name of a local pariah, as if sharing the last name of Smith or McCurdy in the same town automatically means you share the gene pool of that person and worse yet, their skeleton in the closet.
4. Secrets - the aforementioned skeletons in the closet will be know to the public in instances where political candidates with a viable chance of winning find themselves up agains desperate politicos doing anything to dig their claws in, including bringing up some incosequential thing from a persons past, like a DUI conviction, PFA or out of wedlock child. These all appeal to the family values set.
5. Moralism - false or true, using the classic political sleight of hand strategem of appealing to the altruism of voters by invoking topics like gay marriage, right to die and minimum wage appeal not to the political reality of the landscape of brain drain, economic stagnation or environmental ignorance but to the easy solution - a solution in search of a problem, meanwhile all the rhetoric wasted on debating something that is a nonissue in the political mainstream and takes up all the time of governing for the time the media decides to focus on the topic and means another time frame whereby real problems are going largely unsolved by the lawmakers we are supposedly electing to solve them who, in thier infintie political wisdom, choose to engage in partisanship and the politic of party loyalties instead of governing.

Are we willing to sacrifice the morality of a clean campagin that debates the issues and personalities involved, without doing opposition research to shank the opponent in the gut and leave them metaphorically bleeding at the roadside of the political elephant and donkey show? I'm not, and I dont like working for politicians who would cut the Achilles tendon of an opponent just to advance their own self-interest, which never seems to be coincident with the interests of their constituency.