My First Impulse: Attack!! is discourse zero sum?

After randomly selecting Mitt Romney as My Candidate, I was rip roarin' ready to go- ready to join the ranks and spread the good Mitt Word.

But the first thing I noticed is that as soon as I had committed myself to a single candidate, my impulse was to deride and attack the other candidates. A story appeared in the news about John McCain's poor fundraising, and I found myself thinking about how I could attack McCain to build up Romney- and that is exactly the type of thinking and political discourse I wanted to shy away from as part of this experiment.

I would like to think that my first impulse would have been, what is it that's great and uplifting about my candidate that I can share with others, in what way does he add value to our civic system? Instead, it seems like I am hardwired (or trained? By the media or my legal training?) to think of political discourse as zero sum- anything negative about the other guy must boost my guy, and the more good I can spin about my guy, the louder I can say it, the more oxygen I can suck out of the room for the other guy to say good things about himself.