 McFADDEN |
and DOUG WILLIS |
 WILLIS |
|
IS THE PLAN!  An earth mover in California begins to mine great slogs of goopy mud for candidates to use in the upcoming November elections. |
California's fall election
may set mud-toss record
and DOUG WILLIS
of TheColumnists.com
|
....The Editors |
Fasten your seatbelts,
innocent voters. Another mud-filled election campaign is headed
your way, and California in particular can expect the loudest,
largest assault of negative campaigning in the history of state
elections.
Every election year, voters bemoan how much they hate political
mudslinging. And in every election year the polls confirm that
70 or 80 or even 90 percent of the voters dislike the half-truths,
distortions and outright lies of the political commercials which
spew day and night from their television sets--now in high definition.
So, how do the smart political consultants respond to that overwhelming
voter revolt against their tactics? They produce even more mud-slinging
ads, each round worse than the one before, (which seems impossible
until you are subjected to the ads.)
“There’s something wrong with this picture,” you
might say. But when you begin to look around for someone to blame,
you will miss the villain if you don’t look in the mirror.
That right! You are to blame, you not-so-innocent victim!
What are we talking about? We are merely observing that as voters
what we say is quite different than what we do.
Like the political consultants, the pollsters are very clever
people, and they do a very good job of catching our collective
inconsistencies.
There is no question that nearly all of
us voters don’t like political mudslinging. We would prefer
positive, honest ads. That’s what we tell ourselves and
what we tell the pollsters.
But that isn’t what we do. After we tell the poll taker
how much we want clean campaigns and tell him or her who we intend
to vote for, the pollsters invariably ask us why we support one
candidate over another.
Now, search your conscience, didn’t you repeat something
horrible about the other guy (or gal) that you heard in a TV
ad?
That’s because of the “sleeper effect.” Researchers
tell us you see an ad on television saying that candidate Joe
Blow is a dishonest bum. You discount it, because it’s all
just dirty political advertising. But then, as time passes, you
tend to forget who made the accusation, but you remember from
somewhere that Blow is a dishonest bum.|
"Everybody hates negative ads; then they rate them most
effective in terms of decision making," Janet Mullins, the
1998 Bush campaign's media director, told researchers.
Added to that is the mood of the electorate--angry, anti-establishment,
ready to believe the darkest rumors about candidates. It’s
an electorate tailor-made for negative campaigning.
Added to all this is the fact that some candidates wear a sign
saying “kick me.”
Colorado GOP gubernatorial hopeful Dan Maes recently accused
his opponent, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, of threatening
Coloradans’ freedom by encouraging bicycle use. He said
the City of Denver was part of an international organization
that promotes things such as biking, and that is a strategy “dictated
to us by this United Nations program.
“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,”
he said.
Will Hickenlooper use that statement in a negative way against
Maes? Does Vladimir Putin live in Russia?
Of course, you have to be careful. The Conservative Party in
Canada once ran an online image of a bird (it was a puffin) defecating
on the head of the opposition leader. The Conservatives apologized.
Sen. Elizabeth Dole, running for re-election in 2008, ran an
ad against her Democratic challenger, Kay Hagan, depicting Hagan
as “Godless.” Turns out Hagan is a former Sunday school
teacher. Dole lost, and most observers believe the ad played
a large role in her defeat. It’s called the “boomerang
effect,” where the ad rebounds to the detriment of the instigator.
Republican Carly Fiorina and Democrat Barbara Boxer will run--or
are already running--negative campaign ads against each other
in the race for the U.S. Senate, and so will gubernatorial hopefuls
Meg Whitman, the Republican, and Jerry Brown, the Democrat. What
makes this year’s donnybrook especially noteworthy, however,
is the amount of money available to fuel the mudslide. Republican
Whitman has already dumped more that $104 million into her campaign
for governor, and this is still just the traditional warmup period
for the November election. By contrast, Brown, has raised “only”
$23 million.
Just to put it all perspective, Barack Obama spent a mere $74
million on television ads to gain the Democratic nomination for
president in 2008.
With a little more than two months to go, we’re already getting a taste of the campaigns’ underhanded tactics. Brown is accusing Meg Whitman of being a capitalist, and Whitman is accusing Brown of being ..... well, of being Jerry Brown.
©2010 by Charles M. McFadden and Doug Willis. This column first posted Aug. 30, 2010.
You
can comment on this column online via our TALKBACK page. Please address your e-mail message
to either "The Editors" or Chuck McFadden at Syndpack@aol.com
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