2010: Democrats Set Records for Dirtiest Election Ever

Sunday, 24 Oct 2010 05:59 PM

By: David A. Patten

"Everything you are seeing on TV is a shameful lie."

That statement didn't come from an ad-weary voter, but it certainly could have.

It's actually a quote from GOP state Sen. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina.
The reason for Mulvaney's disgust? Democrats recently aired an ad showing police booking an elderly woman into jail, as a narrator warns seniors that Mulvaney may take away their Social Security.

Mulvaney, running for Congress against Democratic Rep. John Spratt, called the 30-second spot "one of the most offensive and frightening ads I think I've ever seen."

As bad as it is, that ad may not even be the worst of this season's dirty campaign advertising tricks.

Just ask Ben Kalasho, who's running for the city council in Santee, Calif., northeast of San Diego. One morning he got a call from a voter asking why he was putting up campaign posters in Arabic.

Huh?

According to the local CBS affiliate, someone printed up signs calling Kalasho "The Arab Leader Santee Needs." To drive the attack home the sign displayed some Arabic characters.

"The funny thing," Kalasho said when he learned of the mysterious signs, "is I'm Polish."

Those are just a few examples of the extraordinarily negative tone that political campaigns are striking this year.

Faced with an angry electorate and a poisonous anti-incumbent zeitgeist, many Democratic incumbents feel they have no choice but to launch personal attacks against their opponents.

While Republicans have been taking aim at Democrats voting record, including their backing a $787 billion stimulus that failed to produce the promised jobs and a $500 billion cut to Medicare for Seniors, Democrats have gotten mean with ad hominen attacks.

In Florida’s 22nd Congressional District Democratic Rep. Ron Klein is airing a flurry of commercials saying conservative Republican challenger Allen West didn’t pay his credit card bills and has close ties to a motorcycle gang. West has denied the charges about the motorcycle gang but admitted he did not pay some credit card bills on time. His excuse? He was serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and his family back home was stretched, he says.

In Staten Island, New York Democratic Rep. Michael McMahon is bombarding airwaves with ads saying his Republican challenger, Michael Grimm, lost money speculating in real estate and operated a failed restaurant.

It's a political game played by both sides of the aisle in every election, of course. But there are indications the midterm election of 2010 is emerging as one of the dirtiest races ever with most of the mud flying from Democratic ramparts.

"We always say this is the most negative cycle," Evan Tracey, an analyst who tracks campaign ads for the Northern Virginia-based Campaign Media Analysis Group, tells the Washington Post. "But 2010 probably will be it. The national issues are huge, and both parties hold the view that you have to blow up your opponent."

The Wesleyan Media Project tracked nearly 900,000 advertisements from January through October. Its conclusions: 20 percent of this year's ads attack the personal characteristics of their opponents. That's up from 14 percent in the 2008 campaign, they report.

"The Democrats are wary of trying to brag about anything, given the bad mood and the recession," said Eugene Kiely, an official with the FactCheck.org watchdog. "So they have done relatively few positive ads.
"It's been attack from the beginning," he told The Huffington Post.

This cycle, it's no longer just the candidates being targeted with negative advertising, either. In July, Target donated $150,000 to a pro-business organization that gives money to pro-business politicians, both Democrats and Republicans.

MoveOn, which is partially funded by leftist billionaire George Soros, struck back at Target with an ad of its own that stated: "Target and other big corporations are trying to buy our elections." It called for a boycott against Target, stating, "Our democracy is not for sale." Fox News host Bill O'Reilly called the MoveOn attack ad "dirty, dishonest and disgusting."

Among this year's more notable examples:

* Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin didn't even wait for GOP opponent Ron Johnson to win the primary. Seven weeks before Johnson officially became his opponent, Feingold aired an ad claiming Johnson would "hand over the Great Lakes to the oil companies." It showed a U.S. map, with an oil slick ominously spreading from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Michigan.

* Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida, mocking the conservative Christian beliefs of GOP challenger Dan Webster, has been calling him "Taliban Dan" on the campaign trail. Even the liberal St. Petersburg Times, calling it a “despicableâ€