The WaPos’ Michael Grunwald wrote a terrific front-page piece today on many of us have found to be an increasingly disturbing pattern: this year’s campaign ads are some of the most egregious in recent memory.
On the brink of what could be a power-shifting election, it is kitchen-sink time: Desperate candidates are throwing everything. While negative campaigning is a tradition in American politics, this year’s version in many races has an eccentric shade, filled with allegations of moral bankruptcy and sexual perversion. […]
The result has been a carnival of ugly, especially on the GOP side, where operatives are trying to counter what polls show is a hostile political environment by casting opponents as fatally flawed characters. The National Republican Campaign Committee is spending more than 90 percent of its advertising budget on negative ads, according to GOP operatives, and the rest of the party seems to be following suit.
This is an entirely fair analysis. Far too many Republicans, facing near desperation, made a right turn at going negative and went straight for going hysterical. A few news outlets have suggested this is a bi-partisan problem (ABC News, we’re looking at you), but the facts clearly show otherwise. One side has veered into ugly, dishonest smears in its advertising, and one side is going after their rivals on issues and job performance.
Poking around some of the conservative voices in the ‘sphere today, it’s great to see conservative bloggers acknowledging the problem and owning up to the problems with the GOP’s approach to public discourse. No, I’m just kidding; far-right blogs are livid with Grunwald for pointing out the facts. One said the piece “is not really a news article; it is cheerleading.”
Perhaps it’s best to let the facts speak for themselves.
* In New York, the NRCC ran an ad accusing Democratic House candidate Michael A. Arcuri, a district attorney, of using taxpayer dollars for phone sex. “Hi, sexy,” a dancing woman purrs. “You’ve reached the live, one-on-one fantasy line.” It turns out that one of Arcuri’s aides had tried to call the state Division of Criminal Justice, which had a number that was almost identical to that of a porn line. The misdial cost taxpayers $1.25.
* In Ohio, GOP gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell, trailing by more than 20 points in polls, has accused front-running Democratic Rep. Ted Strickland of protecting a former aide who was convicted in 1994 on a misdemeanor indecency charge. Blackwell’s campaign is also warning voters through suggestive “push polls” that Strickland failed to support a resolution condemning sex between adults and children. Strickland, a psychiatrist, objected to a line suggesting that sexually abused children cannot have healthy relationships when they grow up.
* The Republican Party of Wisconsin distributed a mailing linking Democratic House candidate Steve Kagen to a convicted serial killer and child rapist. The supposed connection: The “bloodthirsty” attorney for the killer had also done legal work for Kagen.
* In two dozen congressional districts, a political action committee supported by a white Indianapolis businessman, J. Patrick Rooney, is running ads saying Democrats want to abort black babies. A voice says, “If you make a little mistake with one of your hos, you’ll want to dispose of that problem tout de suite, no questions asked.”
* In the most controversial recent ad, the Republican National Committee slammed Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.) for attending a Playboy-sponsored Super Bowl party. In the ad, a scantily clad white actress winks as she reminisces about good times with Ford, who is black. That ad has been pulled, but the RNC has a new one saying Ford “wants to give the abortion pill to schoolchildren.”
Grunwald noted, accurately, that some Dems have gotten personal in their advertising. That’s absolutely true. In Pennsylvania, for example, Rep. Don Sherwood (R-Pa.) had a mistress whom he allegedly tried to strangle, and his Democratic challenger, for some wacky reason, seems to believe it’s worth reminding voters about the incident.
The way I look at it, there’s softball, hardball, and dirtyball. Dems are playing hardball — they’re taking real, substantive issues, and creating hard-hitting ads. Emphasizing scandals is absolutely part of the process and is fair game, so long as the scandals actually happened. The GOP and its allies, in contrast, are playing dirtyball — they’re making things up, trying to suppress voter participation in the process, playing on people’s prejudices, and trying to win through fear. Indeed, I could probably write a whole chapter about the pure insanity of Vernon Robinson’s ads in a book about the more offensive campaign advertising in U.S. history.
For the most part, the GOP has lost sense of what it even means to run a “negative” ad.
Rep. Ron Kind pays for sex!
Well, that’s what the Republican challenger for his Wisconsin congressional seat, Paul R. Nelson, claims in new ads, the ones with “XXX” stamped across Kind’s face.
It turns out that Kind — along with more than 200 of his fellow hedonists in the House — opposed an unsuccessful effort to stop the National Institutes of Health from pursuing peer-reviewed sex studies. According to Nelson’s ads, the Democrat also wants to “let illegal aliens burn the American flag” and “allow convicted child molesters to enter this country.”
To Nelson, that doesn’t even qualify as negative campaigning. (emphasis added)
This isn’t new; it’s just become more pronounced as the GOP gets less concerned about propriety.
Sure, neither party is simon pure, but Tapper and McCown know perfectly well that the nauseating and polarized nature of modern American politics is almost entirely a Republican invention. From Lee Atwater to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to Ken Starr to Tom DeLay to the Rove/Bush/Cheney machine, the Republican Party has pioneered a scorched-earth approach to politics that Democrats have never come close to matching. Their destruction of congressional traditions in the service of power has gone immensely farther than anything Democrats did when they were in power. Their deliberate and single-minded fealty to K Street lobbyists makes Democrats look like pikers.
How can this not be obvious?