Nobody does it better…
The end of the race for the next president of the United States approaches. This campaign certainly has not been boring and as we near the finish, the torque of political campaigning increases.
One site, in particular, from which you can view the colorful history of television campaign ads is http://www.4president.us/tv/tv1988.htm.
According to the Hulu Blog, President Lyndon Johnson ran the very first TV campaign attack ad. I am not sure if that is entirely accurate but the ad to which they refer, the “Daisy” ad, has an edge and a polish that must have set a new tone in political campaigning.
The “Daisy Ad” can be seen at http://blog.hulu.com/2008/10/25/historic-campaign-ads.
The Monday, November 3 issue of the New York Times had the following editorial on political smear campaigns. It’s all interesting stuff … if you can stomach it.
November 3, 2008
New York Times editorial
“The Soiled Envelope, Please”
There are no awards for the season’s slimiest political messages (Swift Boat statuettes?), but two deserve consideration in the character assassination category.
In the first, Republicans in Pennsylvania flooded 75,000 Jewish voters with an e-mail alarum from a retired Jewish judge equating a vote for Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of Jews who ignored the warning signs of the Holocaust. Quick apologies and retractions were offered once this surfaced in the press, but too late for the unspeakable to be spiked.
In the second, the campaign of Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who is in a very tight race, broadcast her desperation by attacking her opponent, State Senator Kay Hagan, for accepting “godless money” at a “secret” fund-raiser whose hosts included a leader of a secularist group.
At the end, the TV screen fills with a shadowy photo of Ms. Hagan, an elder at her Christian church, as a female voice fairly shrieks: “There is no God!”
Then there is the fringe madness of “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America” — an apocalyptic fiction making the rounds from the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family Action. It foresees an Obama incumbency marked by terrorist attacks on American cities, rampant crime as guns are confiscated, a nuclear attack on Israel and the Boy Scouts’ disbanding to avoid court-empowered gay leaders.
It seems just another straight-line for Jon Stewart until the nation remembers that the group’s leader is James Dobson. He is one of the most prominent leaders on the evangelical right, with an audience measured in the scores of millions.
The Democrats have their share of slimy ads, like one targeted at the elderly that falsely claims John McCain would cut Social Security benefits in half. We’re not excusing that ad or any other policy distortions. But frankly, it’s not even an also-ran compared with what the McCain campaign and its allies have been up to.
So I have to ask: Dear Reader, what do you think of the level of smear in the 2008 campaign?
