Negative Ads Heat Up as Election Looms
Oct. 28, 2004 — -- In battleground states across the country, voters are seeing a no-holds-barred, relentlessly negative advertising blitz as Election Day nears.
"This is going to be the most attack-driven election in the modern history of the presidency," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Packaging the Presidency and The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories that Shape the Political World." "It's also going to be the dirtiest."
Both the Kerry and Bush campaigns have contributed greatly to the nasty tenor, though third-party groups are also picking up a lot of the slack.
In Iowa, a television advertisement presented by the group truthandhope.org shows brutal images of men, women and children killed and injured in Iraq. The disturbing pictures are intercut with video of President Bush joking about not having found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, making him appear callous.
A Bush-Cheney ad playing on Spanish-speaking TV in Florida, and aimed at Cuban-Americans, accuses Sen. John Kerry of being a supporter of Fidel Castro, the communist dictator of Cuba. It takes Kerry's position on the embargo against Cuba out of context and portrays him as an extremist.
The Swift Boat Veterans, in their latest television ad, continue to tell American voters that "John Kerry cannot be trusted."
The Media Fund, a liberal group that opposes Bush's re-election, is airing an ad that attempts to draw a connection between Bush and the 9/11 hijackers from Saudi Arabia.
"This is the ugliest campaign for president that I've witnessed in my lifetime, and I started looking at elections in 1948," said Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
On occasion in the past, a presidential campaign might be noted for one particularly nasty ad -- President Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy" ad in 1964, for instance, which implied that his Republican challenger would start a nuclear war. Or the infamous 1988 "Willie Horton" ad from allies of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. The ads, focusing on a convicted murderer who raped a woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison, were designed to paint Democrat Michael Dukakis as soft on crime.
