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A tough year for attack ads and personal attacks

November 19, 2008 — As a campaign tactic, negativity has had better years.

Not that guilt by association, wild exaggeration and personal attacks didn’t play a role in this election season, as they always do. But in several instances the candidates perceived to have waged the more negative campaign lost, and from the presidential campaign down to congressional races, mud-slinging that might have worked in another year fell flat.

With much of the money that fueled 527 ads four years ago on the sidelines and circumstances – John McCain’s status as a former POW, and Barack Obama’s race – that made each side more cautious, the presidential race produced no equivalent of the Swift Boat ads of four years ago.

“It’s helpful to have something that people care about. The McCain campaign didn’t really have any good information on Obama that was effective,” said Kerwin Swint, author of “Mudslingers, the Top 25 Negative Campaigns of All Time.”

 The Jeremiah Wright story had played out by the end of the primaries, and Republican attempts to associate Barack Obama personally with ‘60s radical Bill Ayers, and categorically with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, never gained traction. With voters’ attention fixed on the worsening economy, the old attack strategies didn’t work as well this year. But that doesn’t mean those grainy-shot attack ads got any softer.

 “Desperation,” Swint noted, “brings out desperate tactics.”

There was no better evidence of this than what Raleigh News and Observer executive editor John Crescher described recently as “the national cheap shot of the year,” US Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s “Godless” ad,  which implied that her opponent, Kay Hagan, a Presbyterian elder, had espoused atheism. This led to a slander suit, now withdrawn, a stinging slapback ad from Hagan, and defeat.

But Democratic consultant Gary Pearce, who runs a lively North Carolina blog  with Republican strategist Carter Wrenn, says the wrong lessons can be drawn from the ad, which, like US Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ 2002 ad attacking former US Sen. Max Cleland, drew national attention.

“The myth is going to be that she lost because of that ad. The truth is she ran that ad because she was losing,” Pearce said.

In reality, he says, negative campaigning – used with more subtlety and money by Democratic candidates in North Carolina this year – worked very well. Dole, Pearce said, had been considered safe before Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman Chuck Schumer arrived “with $11 million and a meat ax,” Pearce said. Much of that money went into the DSCC “rocking chair”   ad, which made sly references to the incumbent’s advancing age.

“It was a very humorous way of saying, on top of everything else, she’s as old as John McCain,” Pearce said.

Pearce also noted Democrat Bev Perdue’s radio ads, which were denounced by her Republican opponent in the governor’s race, Pat McCrory, as “racist.” Targeted at that narrow slice of mostly rural and aging North Carolinians who still define themselves as conservative Democrats, one ad has a character wondering if McCrory, the mayor of Charlotte, is running for “mayor of Tijuana.”

But with the current of the election running their way, Democratic candidates in North Carolina and elsewhere – the Bobby Bright-Jay Love congressional race in Alabama comes to mind – could afford to aim their shots at tighter niches and soften their jabs with jokes.

The email whispering campaigns about Obama’s religion, which weren’t associated with McCain’s campaign, also proved to be ineffective. But Swint, who takes the long view on negativity, notes that the advances made by Obama’s campaign in connecting with voters through emails and text messages could be exploited in a future campaign to deliver negative messages about the opposition more swiftly and effectively.

That could open a whole new field of mud.