US election ads: mining the pit of sleaze?
The fight for the Republican presidential nomination has become submerged in a negative advertising blitz. So who’s saying what – and with whose dollars?
Three billion dollars. Yes, that’s right. Three billion. That’s how much the experts at Kantar Media believe will be spent on political TV ads in the 2012 election – possibly more. And to judge from the most recent avertising blitz, you can expect a giant slew of attacks. Most of it’s being funded by a secretive group of donors, channeling their cash through advocacy groups known as Super PACs. Unlike direct contributions to candidates, these groups can spend as much as they like.
Tonight those wealthy donors are supposed to disclose who they are – although you might not know it: the Federal Election Commission has failed to agree any rules governing disclosure. What we do know, though, is that the Republican rivals and their supporters have already spent $44 million on advertising so far, four times more than this point in the 2008 campaign. Indeed, at $15 million and counting, Mitt Romney’s camp has already splurged far more than John McCain did on the whole of his Presidential bid.
But don’t suppose for a moment that all this adds up to an exercise in popular democracy, informing voters on the key issues and the differences between rival policies. This year, more than any other election in history, the knives are out, and the attacks get more outrageous by the day.
Florida swampland
Take Florida, scene of today’s hard-fought primary campaign, and there’s more fearsome teeth on display than a shark-infested aligator swamp. The airwaves are deluged with political ads, most of them backing Mitt Romney, whose deep pockets have helped him outspend Newt Gingrich by a margin of 5 to 1. According to Kantar Media, 92% of those advertisements have been negative, trading insults over the airwaves like never before.
There are the usual swipes at policy that you might expect – but these ads are going much further. Newt Gingrich is accused of calling Spanish “the language of the ghetto” (in a Spanish language ad, of course) – and of ‘Resigning in Disgrace’ over ethics violations, despite the fact that he actually resigned two years after a reprimand, because the Republicans had lost a raft of seats.
Two Romney campaign ads, Unreliable Leader (above) and Undisciplined, don’t just play on Gingrich’s personality, but alludes to his mental state – and the Washington Post unearthed a campaign mailing which paints the former speaker as “Unethical. Erratic. Reckless”. And a swathe of interlinked radio and TV ads bang home the link between Gingrich and the unpopular state mortgage company, Freddie Mac: “While Florida families lost everything in the housing crisis. Newt Gingrich cashed in.”
The former Speaker has been just as merciless. In ‘What Kind of Man’, he spliced in a clip of former Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee back in ’08 proclaiming “If a man’s dishonest to get a job, he’ll be dishonest on the job.” Cut to a grainy, out of focus image of Romney: “What kind of man would mislead, distort and deceive just to win an election? This man would.” The Boston Globe asserts that the commercial contains a number of claims which Romney could justifiably dispute.
And to top it all – how about Romney snatching kosher food from the mouths of Holocaust victims? Yes, really, if audio of a Gingrich campaign robocall in Florida is to be believed. Huffington Post has posted the clip, which refers back to 2003 when Romney briefly vetoed spending $600,000 on kosher food for residents of elderly care homes. That’s translated into this: “Holocaust survivors, who for the first time, were forced to eat non-kosher, because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for our grandparents to eat kosher. Where’s Mitt Romney’s compassion for our seniors?”
Hold onto that kreplach: it might be your last. There’s been no response on this one from the Gingrich campaign, while Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul told Huffington Post that “Speaker Gingrich will say anything to distract voters”. Meanwhile, Governor Romney himself has defended his tactics by saying he’s just preventing his rival from defining him. “I really can’t let him say those things about me without responding”.
These, after all, are the rules of the game: in its study of negative advertising during the 2008 contest, the Brookings Institution notes that open, competitive races with a large number of candidates tends to favour negativity. The unlimited, indiscriminate spending this time round has merely made that ten times worse. The sheer avalanche of attacks has undoubtedly helped to knock Newt Gingrich off the top spot in Florida – but there’s a risk. Relentless negativity can certainly switch off voters, especially women and independents. Never mind the primaries; should he win the nomination, that’s an image that could seriously hurt Romney if he faces Obama in the fall.