ShareThisBy ZACHARY COILE
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
To hear the TV ad tell it, Democratic House candidate John Cranley of Cincinnati loves using Tasers on small children.
He "voted to allow children as young as seven to be tased," says the ad, paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee. "Seven-year-olds, tased! With 50,000 volts of electricity!"
Of course, the ad never mentions that Cincinnati police regulations approved Tasers as a non-lethal way to subdue suspects ages 7 to 70. Cranley's alleged offense was joining a 5-4 City Council decision not to raise the age to 10 because council members feared batons or pepper spray would be used instead.
Forget about a battle of ideas. With dozens of close races and control of Congress at stake, desperate candidates and operatives in both parties are reaching for the "dirty" button, unleashing a torrent of negative and often personal attack ads.
"Neither party nationally has a lot to run on, so they've decided they're better off raising doubts about the other side than touting their own accomplishments," said John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who studies negative ads.
While some ads are based on issues _ attacking an opponent's position on Iraq, immigration or stem cell research _ most of the hardest-hitting spots go straight for character, portraying rivals as unethical, scandal plagued or worse.
Take the ad run by the Republican congressional committee against Democratic House candidate Michael Arcuri, a district attorney in New York, which accuses him of billing taxpayers to call a phone sex fantasy line. In the ad, a female voice says, "Hi, sexy," as Arcuri appears to wink at a silhouette of a woman dancing seductively in the background.
In fact, the call was a misdial by one of Arcuri's associates who used a wrong area code to call the state's Division of Criminal Justice Services (phone records show he dialed the right number a minute later). The call to the sex line cost taxpayers $1.25.
Or consider the ad run by Republican House candidate Vernon Robinson saying that his opponent, Democratic Rep. Brad Miller of North Carolina, denied funds for things like body armor for U.S. troops while approving federal money for racy sex studies. The ad stamped an "XXX" over Miller's smiling photo and included animal noises.
"That's right, instead of spending money on sickle-cell research, Brad Miller voted to spend your money to study the sex lives of Vietnamese prostitutes in San Francisco," utters the narrator in the TV ads. "Instead of spending money on cancer research, Brad Miller spent your money to study the masturbation habits of old men."
In fact, the studies were funded by the National Institutes of Health to assess HIV transmission among prostitutes and study declining sexual function in elderly men. Miller voted with a bipartisan majority, 212-210, against a Republican amendment in 2003 to cancel several research grants after opponents argued those decisions should be left to scientists, not politicians.
Both parties are airing the attack ads. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran an ad accusing Republican Rep. Clay Shaw of Florida of taking part in a "drug deal" by buying drug company stock before voting for the Medicare prescription drug plan and profiting by selling the stock afterward. But the company's drugs, which fight cancer, were already covered by Medicare, so Shaw's vote did not affect the stock price.
Still, many of the most heavily criticized attack ads this election season have been crafted by GOP media strategists and financed by Republican committees in Washington, including the now infamous "Call me" ad in the U.S. Senate campaign in Tennessee.
The ad, paid for by the Republican National Committee, featured a scantily clad white woman who claims she met Democratic Rep. Harold Ford, who is black, at a Playboy party and later winks and says, "Harold, call me." Critics said the ad plays to deep-seated fears of interracial dating, and even Ford's Republican opponent, Bob Corker, called the ad "distasteful."
"There's a racial code in that ad," Vanderbilt's Geer said. "The ad sets a new low. It's unfortunate."
Factcheck.org, a Web site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed all the ads running in the top 101 media markets in the country by the national Republican and Democratic congressional committees. Of the 115 Republican ads, 91 percent were deemed negative, according to the group. Of the Democrats' 104 ads, 81 percent were judged negative.
Federal Election Commission reports show the Republican committee has spent $41.9 million attacking Democrats and $5 million praising its own candidates _ an 8-to-1 negative-to-positive ratio. The Democratic committee has spent $18 million attacking Republicans and $3.1 million backing Democrats _ an almost 6-to-1 negative-to-positive ratio.
"A lot of people are saying this is most negative election in history, but I'm always skeptical of those comments because I hear them every election," said Brooks Jackson, director of Factcheck.org and a longtime political reporter for CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press. "This time it might be true. It's hard to see when over 90 percent of the Republican ads are negative how you could go any more negative than this."
