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Elections used to be fun. They aren’t anymore.

Election days and the campaigns that preceded them used to be almost as good as Christmas but that was before politics was dumped into the gutter.

There was a time when common sense suggested a candidate for office should never mention his or her opponent’s name, not on the stump, not in advertising. Why give one’s opposition a free ride by the mention of his or her name?

Campaign ads these days almost always mention the opponent’s name — usually framed by vicious accusations, insidious innuendo and slanderous hyperbole. Rumor-filled e-mail campaigns have become standard operating procedure. Forget the facts, forget the issues. Forget one’s own resume and vision. Just make sure you plant fear and doubt in the minds of voters about your opponent.

A legendary mayor of a mid-size southern city used say, “I don’t care if you say something good about me or bad about me. Just say something about me.”

The wisdom there suggested — correctly — it is the name that registers with voters, not the criticism. Mudslinging campaigns come and go. Some of the most vitriol ever published in this republic came from the pamphleteers of our republic’s early days.

I don’t know about the rest of you but I’ll be a happier voter when attack campaigns fall back out of fashion. It’s seemed for a while, now, that “attack” is the only campaign tactic we know. It’s even acquired its own moniker: “swift-boating,” we’ve come to call it.

Some political scientists say they can pin-point the precise time the modern method exploding campaign tactics became the weapon of choice.

The year was 1970. A U.S. Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee (father of the former vice-president and current Nobel Laureate) was running for re-election. His opponent was a relatively young member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Bill Brock.

Gore was one of the most venerable, respected and progressive members of the U.S. Senate. Brock hailed from a wealthy, manufacturing family.

The Brock campaign vilified Gore relentlessly in speeches, letters to the editors, television and radio spots (no Internet in those days). Gore was among the first U.S. Senators to vocally oppose the war in Vietnam and campaign ads portrayed him as everything from a wimp to a Communist. The tactics worked and Brock turned out of the nation’s most senior lawmakers.

We found out a few years later that campaign was the first test of Richard Nixon’s now-famous (or infamous) “dirty tricks” campaign template. The same people who helped the Nixon White House sabotage opponents’ campaigns in 1972 cut their political teeth on the biting campaign against Albert Gore.

We’ve certainly seen our share of nasty campaigns since then, many of them along the same lines: fear, fear and more fear.

Frankly, I’m sick of it.

It’s easier, I guess, for political candidates to shovel mud than to talk about substantive issues. Issues get complicated and solutions to great problems are not easy. But do we really want people who take the easy way — the fear-mongering attack mode — to be the people who will make big decisions affecting our lives?

Maybe, just maybe, if the electorate in general would simply decide to not vote for fear-and-attack candidates would see campaigns sprout legs, climb out of the gutter and back onto the high ground our republic deserves.

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Steve Hart is a sailor, angler, explorer, raconteur, amateur citrus-grower and semi-professional theologian who masqueraded as a Florida journalist and pundit for the last 25 years. His book, “Tales from Down Yonder, Florida,” is available in local bookstores and on the Web at www.downyonderflorida.com.