Stinging negative ads stir up controversy
By Jenny Ratzel
With election week
less than a week away, candidates are saturating the air waves with
their final campaign advertisements. However, this election season, ads
have been particularly controversial.
Debating hot topics such as abortion, capital punishment and candidates’ legislative history, advertisements have sparked criticism and infuriated their opponents’ camps.
Hampden Smith, a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee University, thinks that these kind of political advertisements not only spark political controversy but also “demean politics.”
Republican candidate for governor, Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, is currently running four 30-second advertisements which attack Democratic candidate Lieutenant Governor Tim Kaine.
Kilgore’s “Both Ways” ad depicts headlines referring to Kaine’s alleged inconsistencies on abortion issues. The ad was created as a response to Kaine’s abortion ads.
Kaine is currently running two television ads. Both ads are milder in tone, which aim to attract voters who were put off by Kilgore’s pro-capital punishment ad. The ad offered commentary from Stanley Rosenbluth who witnessed the 1999 execution of the man convicted of murdering his son and daughter-in-law.
Rosenbluth accused Kaine of thinking that “Adolf Hitler doesn't qualify for the death penalty.”
Smith likened this ad to Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous mushroom cloud advertisement of the 1964 election season. The ad depicted a young girl pulling petals from a flower while counting, when she reached 10 the shot changed to a man’s voice counting to zero and the explosion of an atomic bomb. Johnson, running against Barry Goldwater, only ran the ad once.
In the race for Virginia Attorney General, a once civil campaign has turned ugly. Republican candidate Robert F. McDonnell struck first, running an ad depicting his opponent, Democrat Creigh Deeds, as a sex offender sympathizer. McDonnell’s ad accused Deeds of making plea agreements to get sex offenders out of jail time.
“That ad is the lowest form of politics,” said Deeds on a Northern Virginia radio show. However, McDonnell claims that Deeds started the attack ads “early on, saying that because I didn’t vote for the biggest tax increase in Virginia history last year that I wasn’t supportive of law enforcement.
Behind all of these advertisements lies the same goal: to mobilize people to vote. Smith claims that “people remember mean and negative ads” and, hence, vote for who they remember. Many times, Smith states, people aren’t voting for someone, they’re voting against someone.
Watch the ads:
Produced by Washington and Lee journalism students.
Lead supervisor: Prof. Claudette Artwick
Reporting supervisor: Prof. Doug Cumming
Editing supervisor: Prof. Pamela Luecke
Technical supervisor: Michael Todd