Soon – within weeks – the 2010 congressional political campaign will have started in earnest – first with a Republican primary in the 1st Congressional District

That ultimately will lead to what’s expected to be a heated campaign in the fall between the Republican nominee (either Sen. Alan Nunnelee, Angela McGlowan, or Henry Ross) versus incumbent Democratic Rep. Travis Childers, who is unopposed in his party, and a covey of third-party candidates.

Judging from the heat already being generated on both sides, it’s not unfair to surmise that potential exists for issues to become obscured by rhetoric that inflames more than discourse that enlightens.

Lisa Miller, a columnist for Newsweek magazine, wrote in late February about civility and incivility in American politics – a practice and code of conduct that’s taken a beating almost everywhere in recent election cycles.

She described a meeting between Republican activist Mark DeMoss, a highly successful public relations magnate, and Lanny Davis, whom she describes as a “a notorious Democratic spinmeister” who was adviser to President Clinton.

The two had never crossed paths until after Hillary Clinton withdrew from the 2008 campaign. It was then that DeMoss wrote to Davis, “I am a conservative evangelical and a Republican, and I suspect that politically you and I have little in common, but in an increasingly polarized political context and country, you have always been gracious, soft-spoken, thoughtful and respectful of your opponents.”

Davis conceded he has not always been so, but he joined forces with DeMoss in the cause of civility in political life.

“We discovered our common humanity and many other things that we had in common, aside from the fact that we disagreed about almost everything in politics,” Davis said.

Miller wrote, “In the DeMoss-Davis vision of things, political opponents are able to admit that they like each other. Political arguments, whether on television or on the floor of Congress, are made and won on the merits, without personal attacks.”

“It’s harder and harder,” DeMoss says, “to win a debate on the strength of your ideas and words. That’s a dumbing-down of America and political discourse. I’m anything but an academic elite, but Obama is not the antichrist, nor is every Republican a saint. Fox News is not infallible, and MSNBC is not all heresy.”

Davis believes that civility would lead to some political progress: “If Obama and the Republicans could be Mark DeMoss and me, we could listen to each other. We would mix and match, and find an incremental solution that may be 25 or 50 percent away from where we want to be. Perfect is the enemy of the good.”

DeMoss won’t concede so much about bipartisanship, but he believes that effective, successful persuasion includes grace, courtesy, and humility.

“Civility, in other words, enhances one’s ability to persuade and convince. Incivility turns people off,” Miller wrote.

Nasty campaigns aren’t unique to the 21st century..

The presidential campaign of 1800 arguably was the worst and most visceral in history.

Supporters of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson fought for their candidates with nasty personal attacks, and a Scots immigrant named James Callender, a Jefferson supporter, wrote some of the harshest language.

He said of President Adams, “In the fall of 1796 .... the country fell into a more dangerous juncture than almost any the old confederation ever endured. The tardiness and timidity of Mr. Washington were succeeded by the rancour [bitterness] and insolence [arrogance] of Mr. Adams. ... Think what you have been, what you are, and what, under [Adams], you are likely to become,” he wrote in the American Aurora.

Adams’s defenders also were vicious. One went said if Jefferson won, “the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.”

In the end, after some high political drama, the election ended with a peaceful transfer of power.

Almost all Americans enjoy politics at some level, and our early history should have taught us some lessons about what not to do as well as how to govern with vision ad boldness.

In the campaign of 2010 – from Democrats, Republicans, and minor party candidates – vision needs to be heard and articulated with civility, not muffled in a din of mutual disdain.