Millions spent on negative political ads
By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - So far this campaign, the political parties have exposed voters to nearly $160 million in ads attacking congressional candidates. How much spent painting a positive image? About $17 million.
And how much spent on actually informing voters of your actual views on actual issues? I’d imagine that amount could be labeled as proportionally infinitesimal.
Negative ads are the coin of the realm in politics. With one week left in the campaign, voters will continue to be bombarded on television, in the mail and over the phone as political strategists make their closing arguments to a shrinking pool of those who haven't made up their minds.
I don’t really watch TV and thus don’t have to subject myself to such on a regular basis. For the few shows I do watch, my significant other has purchased some sort of magical fast-forward feature that allows me to not watch commercials. Ever. It’s an advertiser’s nightmare, but certainly keeps me significantly saner.
Anyway, even taking into account my extreme inexperience with the gamut of television ad techniques, I can still see a clear difference between:
The NRCC tried to place an ad in New York against Democrat Michael Arcuri, the district attorney in Oneida County, accusing him of calling a sex hotline while on county business. But records show that the call to the 800 number lasted only seconds and that the number has the same last seven digits as the phone number for the state Department of Criminal Justice Services. The Arcuri campaign said a colleague of Arcuri's mistakenly placed the call.
and
One ad airing in Pennsylvania cites October as the bloodiest month in Iraq and accuses Republican incumbent Rep. Jim Gerlach of blindly following Bush.
- Millions spent on negative political ads
Come on now. A misdialed number? We can get over this, yes? Please?
As for the negative ads linking Republicans and Bush… well… erm… you are pretty linked, eh? If you don’t wished to be linked with Bush's policies, you may wish to not support his policies that you don’t wish to be linked to. This brings me to my second point: critiquing policy decisions is not in itself smear. It's an essential part of democracy. Building strawmen out policy decisions (or random phone calls), on the other hand, is indeed smear.
***
On a more positive note, I love Project Vote Smart’s NPAT, which allows voters to view the self-report positions on a wide variety of issues, from abortion to election funding to health care to the war on drugs. Unfortunately, many politicians refuse to complete the survey (let the voters know how we actually feel about actual issues? Heaven forbid!). However, with continued pressure from voters I have confidence that this can continue to be a value tool to assess what candidates actually belief… rather than just how they feel about their oppenent's alleged phone calls.
