PORTLAND (AP) – The campaign between President Bush and John Kerry may draw criticism for its negativity, but election-year name-calling is part of a long tradition in American politics, according to experts.

This year’s personal attacks, they say, are far less vitriolic than those of past presidential races that produced charges of promiscuity, war-mongering and just about everything in between.

“People need to realize this is part of the character of American democracy,” said Richard Maiman, head of the political science department at the University of Southern Maine. “Certainly, if people knew more about their history, they would be less shocked.”

Allegations surrounding Kerry’s anti-war activities and Bush’s stint in the National Guard fueled complaints that negative campaigning has sunk to a new low.

But that seems mild compared to the attacks by surrogates for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who squared off in 1800. A Jefferson partisan described Adams as “old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled (and) toothless,” according to the World Almanac of Presidential Campaigns. An Adams-allied newspaper in Connecticut wrote that “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced” if Jefferson was elected.

Maiman said campaign pamphlets and books in USM’s collection show that President James Madison was derided as a pawn of his wife Dolly in 1812 and Andrew Jackson was labeled a killer in the 1828 campaign. Republican John Fremont vigorously denied opposition charges in 1856 that he was a Catholic.

“The candidates would be skewered for any number of things,” Maiman said. Since then, he said, presidential politics has become “a little bit tamer” but strong similarities remain. “This rough and tumble politicking involving negative imagery has been around since the beginning,” he said.

When President Abraham Lincoln sought re-election in 1864, opponents dubbed him the “Illinois Ape,” and the “prince of Jesters,” according to the World Almanac of Presidential Campaigns. Lincoln’s opponent, former Union Gen. George McClellan, was dubbed by his enemies as “Mac the Unready.”

By 1884, Maine’s own James Blaine, the Republican presidential candidate, was being derided as “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, continental liar from the state of Maine.” Democrat Grover Cleveland, who was rumored to have fathered an illegitimate child, was the subject of equally merciless Republican taunts that year: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”

More recently, Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater aired a 60-second ad showing a girl picking petals off a daisy amid an ominous sounding countdown that ended in an atomic blast, implying that Goldwater was a threat to the planet itself.

Independent groups not directly affiliated with the candidates play a bigger role in today’s negative campaigning than in years gone by, said James Melcher, a political scientist at the University of Maine at Farmington.

“In recent years, elections have been a lot tamer,” but negative campaigning has long been a fact of political life in the United States, said John Baughman, a political scientist at Bates College. “From a historical perspective, I don’t think it is at all unusual” this year, he said.

“If it never worked, it would have stopped in 1804,” said Maiman, “but there always seemed to be votes in it.”

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