The frenzied attack unleashed on Sarah Palin and her family by the partisan press has escalated the politics of personal destruction to a level unseen in recent memory.

In the wake of her introduction as John McCain’s running mate, the New York Times devoted four stories in one day to the subject of Governor Palin’s 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy and other supposed scandals lurking in the Palin family closet.

Us Weekly, published by Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, who has donated more than $5,000 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, readied a cover piece on Mrs. Palin with the heading “Babies, Lies and Scandal: John McCain’s Vice President.”

Meanwhile, left wing bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and the creepy cast of characters at the Daily Kos have speculated that Mrs. Palin faked the birth of her five-month-old son, Trig.

The strategy here is simple, as one blogger on the Daily Kos admits: “If health insurance for all, an end to the Iraq War, an end to torture and illegal wiretapping, and a sane energy policy can be obtained at the price of destroying one teenage girl, her family, and the surrendering our self-respect I see that as a cheap trade.”

Such logic is disturbing, but it is hardly unprecedented. While this current campaign to smear and humiliate the family of a candidate is especially intense, such savagery has an unfortunate and sad place in American presidential politics.

In fact, today’s journalists are just following in the shameful footsteps of some of their most disgraced ancestors.

James Callender, who increasingly seems like the patron saint of modern American political journalism, was a Scottish-born scandalmonger who did Thomas Jefferson’s bidding in his wars against Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Prosecuted and stuffed into prison by the Supreme Court under the Sedition Act for his anti-Federalist screed the “Prospect Before Us,” Callender was pardoned upon Jefferson’s ascension to the presidency in 1801.

When Jefferson rejected Callender’s request for an appointment to high office, he then turned on the hand that once fed him, engaging in a back-and-forth smear war with Jefferson’s supporters which culminated in a series of pieces Callender wrote for the Richmond Recorder in 1802 chronicling Jefferson’s romance with a slave named Sally Hemings. In the pieces, Callender detailed Jefferson’s tryst with Hemings and the children they produced.

Jefferson never felt compelled to deny the assertions. To this day, rightly or wrongly, Callender’s allegations are accepted as truth by most and continue to be a distraction from Jefferson’s accomplishments, if not an outright blot on his legacy.

More than 25 years later, while Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams were caught up in one of the most bitter campaigns in American history, Adams’s supporters in the press dug through the history of Jackson’s marriage to wage a personal attack on his wife Rachel.

Before her marriage to Jackson, the former Rachel Donelson had married Lewis Robards. The couple separated in 1790. One year later, Rachel, mistakenly thinking her divorce was final, married Jackson. The Jacksons later realized that the divorce had not been finalized, in essence nullifying the union, and remarried in 1794.

Like their decedents, 19th century scribes had little use for such small details and accused Mrs. Jackson of adultery. The editor of the Cincinnati Gazette and an Ohio partisan of Adams, Charles Hammond, pondered if it was right for “a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and christian land?”

Jackson won the election in a landslide, but it cost him dearly. Rachel’s health declined as the campaign wore on, and the first lady-to-be eventually suffered a fatal heart attack on December 22, 1828. Jackson believed that the mudslinging and the humiliation it brought killed his wife.

Such examples of the consequences of this type of journalism alone should give its practitioners pause. However, the disgrace of an opponent or even the death of their loved ones seem unlikely to phase today’s Callenders.

But perhaps they should remember Andrew Jackson’s words for those he believed had ended his beloved Rachel’s life in the name of politics: “I can and do forgive all my enemies. But those vile wretches who have slandered her must look to God for mercy.”

Mr. Cole is a speech writer based in Washington, D.C., who worked at the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission between 2004 and 2005.