Going Negative: A Long, Sordid but Often Effective History

Oct. 27, 2006— -- Looking for a theme in this year's negative campaigning? How about sex? The ad getting the most buzz depicts an attractive blonde, not overburdened with clothing, claiming "I met Harold at the Playboy party."

She then invites "Harold," presumably Tennessee Democrat Harold Ford, who is running for a Senate seat, to "call me." Ford called the ad "silly." His Republican opponent, Bob Corker, called it "tacky" but said he cannot stop it because an independent group paid for it. This may be the best-known negative ad so far this fall, but there's more.

In Wisconsin, Republican challenger Paul Nelson played the sex card against Democratic incumbent Ron Kind. In Nelson's ad the narrator intones "Ron Kind has no trouble spending your money. He would just rather spend it on sex.

"Instead of spending money on cancer research, Ron Kind voted to spend your money to study the sex lives of Vietnamese prostitutes. Instead of spending money to study heart disease, Ron Kind spent your money to study the masturbation habits of old men ... Ron Kind has spent your tax dollars to pay teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes attached to their genitalia."

Kind says he never supported any of the items cited in the ad. The executive director of the Wisconsin Republican party denounced the ad, and some TV stations refused to air it. But it is still on Nelson's Web site.

In New York, Republicans targeted Democratic House candidate Michael Arcuri with an ad alleging he had phone sex and charged it to taxpayers.

"The telephone number to an adult fantasy Hotline appeared on Michael Arcuri's NewYork City hotel room bill while he was there on official business. The call was charged to Oneida County taxpayers. Arcuri has denied it, but the facts are there," the narrator of the ad says.

Arcuri does indeed deny it, and said one of his aides misdialed while trying to call a state agency with an almost identical number.

In Virginia's bitterly contested Senate race, GOP incumbent George Allen's campaign is quoting a passage about oral sex from the book "Lost Soldiers," which Democrat Jim Webb wrote five years ago about Vietnam. The Allen campaign also quotes sexual passages from other books Webb wrote, including "A Sense of Honor": "If she'd just get laid every now and then, she'd mellow out and stop being such a witch."