If political ads can be compared to attack dogs, this year’s commercials have been pit bulls.
They’re vicious and designed to scare people.
With so much at stake – Republicans wanting to keep control of Congress and Democrats hoping to unlock the GOP stranglehold – the secret strategy is to get nasty and personal to disorient the public.
There are three main goals behind attack ads: Discredit the challenger, confuse the public and – the most Machiavellian – make the electorate apathetic.
Specialists call this strategy “demobilizing voters.”
Both major parties hope to mobilize party loyalists and keep everyone else disinterested.
The party with the most to lose, Republicans, has produced the most negative ads, according to a study by the nonpartisan Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
The study revealed that as of Oct. 19, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $18 million attacking Republicans and $3.1 million supporting Democrats, a 5-to-1 negative-to-positive ratio.
National Republican Campaign Committee has spent far more – $41.9 million attacking Democrats – and just $5 million supporting Republican candidates, an 8-to-1 negative-to-positive ratio.
“It is the most effective way of ensuring that voters who want to vote against Republicans see Democrats as a nonviable alternative and will, as a result, stay at home,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg center.
It’s especially true for unaffiliated voters, who, according to the polls, are leaning Democratic.
“Unaffiliated voters are more subject to advertisements because they’re not getting cues from the party,” said Denver public opinion analyst Floyd Ciruli. “They are out there to be convinced, but they can be convinced not to turn out.”
That’s exactly what’s happening in the 7th Congressional District. An ad for Democrat Ed Perlmutter attempts to align Republican candidate Rick O’Donnell with the Iraq war fiasco by flashing a video of O’Donnell with President George W. Bush and states that the candidate would send 75,000 more troops to Iraq.
An ad for O’Donnell talks about Perlmutter accepting $17,500 in campaign contributions from his wife’s D.C. lobbying firm, an attempt to link Perlmutter to the lobbying scandal. Another says a vote for Perlmutter is a vote for higher taxes and less spending on national security.
In this election, Democrats (who might be finally finding their backbones) are sticking to the mess-in-
Iraq theme.
Republicans, on the other hand, are using distraction tactics. They don’t talk Iraq. They stick to crime and the wedge issues of illegal immigration and gay marriage. Those emotional issues will work to get Republican and the religious right to the polls.
Vice President Dick Cheney is using the same scare tactic that served him well in 2004. Monday on FOX News, he said Iraqis are increasing attacks on each other and the U.S. military so they can sway the election in favor of Democrats.
(In reality, what’s fueling the violence in Iraq is an unemployment rate of about 50 percent. Desperate young Iraqi men are easily recruited into militia groups that feed, clothe and pay them.)
For everyone else, those ads serve to disgust people who may be more interested in bread-and-butter issues.
But why talk about improving schools or a plan to help stimulate the local economy when the wedge issues can effectively eliminate those people as voters to woo?
The bottom line is that it’s better for people in power to keep the electorate ignorant. Because of that, much of the public takes its cues from TV ads.
Those who are informed – people who read newspapers, books, listen to the debates and have an understanding of policy and how the political machine works – are not going to be swayed by 30-second commercials.
Same with party loyalists.
Those are exactly the voters that the Democratic and Republican machines are trying to mobilize, via phone calls, direct mailings and through their stewards: Unions will push for the Dems; evangelicals for the GOP.
Dems are reaching out to the middle, the unaffiliated, knowing that this time they are on their side. The Republicans, generally speaking, hope the unaffiliated voters just stay home.
That’s where the pit bulls come in.
Ciruli said the attack ads are essentially an attack on the political system. It is designed to get voters to think it doesn’t matter who they vote for.
“That’s why you’ll hear people say, ‘My vote doesn’t count,’ ‘Nothing ever changes,’ ‘They are all corrupt,’ ” Ciruli said.
The effort to suppress voters, combined with a poor educational system that doesn’t teach Americans to be critical thinkers or understand the political system, helps explain why the U.S. has a lower voter turnout rate than Peru, Turkey, Thailand, Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina and Mexico.
It’s a Catch-22: The politicians who get voted in aren’t pushing policies that help increase the intellectual class.
This is the sad democracy they help create. And we’re so ignorant we don’t even know it’s a problem that needs fixing.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays and Sundays. Read her blog at denverpostbloghouse.com/
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