When people who believe they are in power, feel their power challenged, they often react in threatening ways. In countries without a tradition of democracy powered by freedom of speech, this can take the shape of death squads. Here in the United States, we try to address transitions of power peacefully at the ballot booth.

However, this does not always work as smoothly as possible. Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were marked by accusations of voter suppression. These accusations have resulted in various convictions. Yet not all voter suppression is illegal. Negative advertising has proven to be an effective method of depressing voter turnout.

In 2004, Gov. Dean ran a campaign of empowerment, encouraging people to get involved. Many people got involved for the first time. Many of them are now getting involved in the campaigns of Sen. Edwards, Sen. Obama, and Sen. Clinton.

In 2006, Ned Lamont ran a campaign that countered the negative advertisements in a few different ways. The first was to poke fun at negative advertisements with the ‘Ned Lamont has a messy desk’ ad. Yet more important was the recurring theme from all of his ads where his supporters responded “And so do we” whenever he said he approved the advertisement. It was a message encouraging all of us to get more involved.

2006 saw the Democrats retake control of congress, and as we enter the 2008 Presidential season, those who are seeing their grasp of power slipping slowly away will become more threatening, especially to those campaigns that are encouraging involvement of new people.

We’ve seen this most recently in the verbal attacks on the Edwards campaign by conservative operatives followed up by veiled physical threats to people working on these campaigns. As campaigns continue to work to involve new people we will see these sort of attacks continue.

Because of this, we need Democratic candidates to stick together and defend one another when attacked by those who would suppress voter participation. Instead of attacking one another for minutiae of whose ideology is most pure, we need to be fighting to see which candidate will do the most to get people more involved in the political process.

Sen. Edwards’ One Corps and Days of Action are one aspect of this, the new social networking tools of the Obama campaign are another. Who will do the most build involvement in our democratic process? Over the coming months, we shall see. Who will be the winner? All of us that love democracy.

(Cross posted at Greater Democracy)