Leadership Quote by Scott McCallum

McCallum is doing the politician’s version of a cleanup on aisle five: he’s condemning a tactic without quite condemning the people who used it, and he’s doing it in the language of “niceness” rather than enforcement. The intent is to signal distance from negative advertising while keeping his hands clean. “I didn’t like it and I don’t like the idea” reads less like moral outrage than brand management: he’s positioning himself as the reasonable adult in a room full of attack ads.

The subtext is all about plausible deniability. He frames the problem not as lying, distortion, or dark money, but as the mere presence of “an opponent’s picture.” That’s telling. It’s not the substance of criticism that bothers him; it’s the visual theater of vilification, the moment an ad turns a rival into a villainous prop. By focusing on aesthetics and tone, he avoids litigating policy disagreements while still nodding to voter fatigue with campaign ugliness.

Then comes the soft-power pivot: “it would be nice to see candidates sign a pledge.” “Nice” is doing heavy lifting. A pledge is voluntary, symbolic, and easy to praise even if it’s easy to break or easy to route around via outside groups. In modern campaign culture, where independent expenditures can carry the nastiest messages while candidates keep their halos, a pledge functions as reputational insulation: a way to say “not my style” while benefiting from the overall atmosphere of attack. McCallum’s line isn’t a reform proposal so much as an attempt to launder negativity through civility talk.