Character Assassination

In USA and in Australia (I have no idea about the other countries), it seems that if you cannot think of good things to say about yourself and your party, be it in terms of policies or positions in issues, you just say bad things about your opponents.

This is the dirty politics that both countries are doing, USA much worse than Australia. The USA media uses the word "character assassination" to describe this.

The sad part is the a lot of people actually believe this character assassination and say that a candidate is bad because he smoked pot in college or he was a womaniser. They don't look at the issues and figure out if this person is the best candidate for this position at a particular point in time. People can never be the best candidate for all times.

Think about this, if I can destroy my opponent's credibility and with a gullible population, why would I bother talking about solutions to problems or policies to implement? It is so much easier to just say a person is bad, liar, cheat... because there is nobody in this world that doesn't have skeletons in their closets and it is so much easier to dig them out than think of good solutions to real problems.

So it would seem that character assassination is here to stay, unless the voting population start taking notice of the candidates and what they and their party stand for and figure out what they themselves want. Then character assassination will have no hold. But sad to say, people are still swayed more by a person's "character" than they are about the issues at hand and the candidate/party's solution.

Are we any better?