Emperor Abraham (Mathew Brady - YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS) People have been railing for some time about how mean this campaign is.

Barbara Bush said that it’s “the worst campaign I’ve ever seen in my life.”

In May, Dan Rather called it “by far the worst” of the 11 campaigns he’s covered.

But is it?

I’m not saying it’s been devoid of low points. Joe Biden is roving around telling people that his opponent wants to put them back in chains, an idea that remains unpopular, despite what “Fifty Shades of Grey” would tell you. And Mitt Romney has even weighed in on the subject of negativity, urging President Obama to take his “campaign of division and anger and hate” back to Chicago.

To hear everyone talk about the campaign, you start to get the idea that had you but been born 200 years earlier, everyone would be shaking hands and complimenting one another’s haberdashery (they had lots of haberdashery back then) and engaging in the Serious Mature Policy Debates that prove so elusive. “Ah, Thomas Jefferson,” they would say, smilingly, “I respect you so much. But purchase Louisiana? It seems like a good value, but doesn’t that exceed your executive authority somewhat?”

There have been, in history, eras of Good Feelings. There have been moments when we came together as a nation to disagree over policy, politely, and with the utmost respect for the good intentions of our opponents.

But, well, not really.

Those may, in fact, be the exceptions, not the rules, a few isolated oases of reason in a desert of yelling that resembled the present more than not.

In 1864, Democrats thundered against Abraham Lincoln in Harper’s Weekly: “We are all the cowering, shivering subjects of the bloody Emperor Abraham.”

Then again, this was the 1860s. The nation was at war. To call it an era of bad feelings would be an understatement along the lines of calling Antietam an unpleasant afternoon. Even in peacetime, things were hardly civil. A few years before, a Massachusetts senator had been brutally caned on the floor of Congress. Perhaps this was a blip.

No, the thing to do is to look further back. Say, to 1828. . .

. . . when Andrew Jackson complained about the unprecedented negativity of the campaign, telling a friend: “even Mrs. J. is not spared, and my pious mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her cradle to her death had not a speck upon her character, has been dragged forth. . . and held to public scorn as a prostitute.” They called his wife “a black wench” and said she was a “profligate woman.” He later blamed the negativity for her death.

“The floodgates,” said Jackson adviser William B. Lewis, “of falsehood, slander, and abuse have been hoisted, and the most nauseating filth is poured, in torrents, on the head, of not only Genl. Jackson but all his prominent supporters.”

The sweater throws the mood off a bit. (Chris Hondros - GETTY IMAGES) It is strange to think that the person directly responsible for the hundreds of pieces of vaguely alarming sex advice that I have read over the years is gone.

But this week saw the passing of Cosmo’s Helen Gurley Brown.

It is hard to come up with a fitting tribute.

Some ink has been spilled already on the subject of what she did for the overall cause of women. Did she help or hurt? Was she a feminist or a shyster? What was her legacy, liberation or lockjaw? All I know is that I have to keep buying her magazine or I’ll never know What He Really Wants You To Do With That Pineapple.

This is not to speak flippantly or ill of the dead. The last time I was even tempted to make uncomfortable jokes about the recently deceased was when the Segway owner literally Segwayed off a cliff, and even then I got some grief for it.

I would suggest that the next time you are incorporating ice into your intimate life or following any other of Cosmo's manifold strange suggestions, you should pause a moment in respect to Helen Gurley Brown. But I am pretty sure that is the opposite of what she would want. Do not pause, she would say. Keep doing what you are doing. You go, girl!

Cosmo is a You Go, Girl, magazine. It aims at the Fun, Fearless Female, whatever this strange beast is. She has it all, whatever it is.

Admittedly, “You go, girl” is an exclamation generally reserved for when you have done something life-wreckingly idiotic and have just told a group of your friends about it. “You go, girl!” everyone says, hefting their mimosas.

That’s why we love Cosmo.

There is frankly nothing on earth I would rather read in an airport. I am not proud of this.

In the echelons of Pursuits in Which I Take Pride it ranks somewhere above stealing other people’s laundry detergent and somewhere below occasionally pretending I need to visit the restroom in the middle of long dinners and then sitting in a stall checking my e-mails. Sure, were I reading “Atlas Shrugged” and Cosmo simultaneously, Cosmo would go on the outside. But that is as far as it goes.

It’s a guilty pleasure. But it’s a national guilty pleasure. It had the highest number of single-copy sales of any magazine in the country during the first half of this year. “Well,” huffs the Economist, “I’d be the most-purchased magazine too if I put SEX SEX SEXY SEX on every cover.” But that’s not the point. It does that, true. But what Cosmo sells is more than sex. It’s know-how. “I actually understand how this works,” Cosmo says.

You can fake an understanding of the economy at parties. “Oh, yes,” you can say. “Something something collapse of the euro something something Greek something. Quantitative easing!” Then you can shake your head sadly, and that will get you at least through dessert. But what about after dessert? That is where Cosmo comes in.

Of course, it has no better idea than anyone else.

Here are some people listening to a Jobbik party protest. (FERENC ISZA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) Don’t you hate it when this happens?

You spend your days denouncing or persecuting something, and then it turns out you are that something.

Recently this happened to a man in Hungary named Csanad Szegedi, a rising force in the Jobbik party, known for its anti-Semitic beliefs. Szegedi had even made some remarks on the subject himself, saying that Jewish people were infiltrating the country’s politics and dishonoring its symbols. So when word got out that his maternal grandparents were Jewish (his grandmother, in fact, was an Auschwitz survivor) but had decided to keep mum about their faith in the years after World War II, things got very awkward very quickly. Last month, he resigned his party membership. Now party members are trying to get him to surrender his seat in the EU parliament, although they say (according to an AP report) that this is because he tried to bribe someone into silence on the subject of his roots, not because of the roots themselves.

It’s an awkward position. There is not much you can do to spin a story like that. (“You see,” he could have tried, “the infiltration has progressed even further than I thought!”) At some point, you simply have to admit what a stupid place you’ve put yourself in. Now Mr. Szegedi has spoken to his grandmother and a rabbi and appears to be going off somewhere to rethink his life. It’s about time.

But there’s plenty of precedent for this sort of discovery. It seems to be an occupational hazard of hate. St. Paul of biblical fame was heading to work along the road to Damascus to persecute some Christians, as was his wont, when he suddenly realized that he was one himself. This sort of thing happens periodically, a variant of the old rule that says the louder you denounce the homosexual menace, the more likely you are to develop an uncontrollable foot-tapping in the stalls of men’s restrooms.

Pot has some words for kettle. (J. Scott Applewhite - AP) On Fox News, commenting on Joe Biden's Danville “Put Y’all Back in Chains” gaffe, Sarah Palin observed: “If that's not the nail in the coffin, really, the strategists there in the Obama campaign have got to look at a diplomatic way of replacing Joe Biden on the ticket with Hillary.”

It is seldom that you get such good quotes from the pot about the color of the kettle.

Then again, you know you’ve made a gaffe when Sarah Palin is suggesting you might have chosen your words more judiciously. That’s like Charlie Sheen suggesting you might have a substance problem.

But perhaps we should cut her some slack. Vice presidential candidates whose comments prompt everyone in the vicinity to wince uncontrollably for several minutes is a subject no one knows better than Palin. Maybe she and Biden were better matched than we thought.

The Gaffer. (MELISSA MELVIN-RODRIGUEZ - AP) There are, as everyone knows by now, two Joe Bidens.

There is the generally competent and affable, if long-winded, vice president we actually have.

And there is Onion Joe, creation of the satirical newspaper the Onion, who has been banned from every Dave & Busters and likes to wash his Trans Am in the White House driveway.

The only trouble is that occasionally Onion Joe intrudes into the actual world. Take the already widely circulated clip from Danville, Va., of Vice President Biden telling voters (the town, the L.A. Times notes, is about 50 percent black) that the Republicans are “going to put y’all back in chains.”

Onion Joe! Get back in the box!

This is, quite frankly, not the sort of thing a Serious Person could ever say and hope for anything less than a public pillorying.

Bad enough to insinuate that your opponent intends to enslave a section of the populace. How mortifyingly divisive. And with that single twanged y’all, this whole interaction became even more awkward than it needed to be. But this is so far from the sort of thing that anyone in a position as lofty as the vice presidency would be expected to say that one’s first response is a sort of mirthful discomfort. Can he hear himself? you wonder. You cannot help feeling that if he could hear himself he would stop at once.

That is the trouble with Joe.

He inspires the sort of discomfort one feels upon introducing one’s fiance to Grandpa after he has had a scotch too many.

“Please,” you mumble under your breath. “Please, please don’t say anything.”

It is not that Tipsy Grandpa has any sinister intent. It is just that his list of Acceptable Ways To Phrase Things has not been updated since 1943 or so. Routinely, in the company of the family, he makes Pole jokes and everyone laughs politely. Sometimes, when the spirit moves him, he recites limericks that imply his opinion of the Irish is low. Every few years you steal his prized lawn sculptures, but he always finds replacements. It is impossible to make him see what is so wrong about them.