This will do wonders for the overall tone of the election, won’t it? From WaPo:
Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.
There’s a snazzy term for this nastiness: “Opposition Research”. Evidently, the point of the exercise is to attack the other guy so that voters will think maybe the challenger isn’t as nice a person as the incumbent.
Because challengers tend to be little-known compared with incumbents, they are more vulnerable to having their public image framed by the opposition through attacks and unflattering personal revelations.
Obviously the technique wasn’t invented for this particular campaign, but for it to be the party’s main campaign strategy??? That’s really sad, folks. The Republicans are behind in the polls and the solution is to let fly with as much mud as possible. Lovely.
Obviously, it’s time to shut the television off, at least until after the elections.
It’s called, “how to campaign when your platform and you record are losers.” WIthout this stuff they’r left with “Isn’t the Iraq war a big success?” and “Working more for less money - good for you!”
Given that the Dems main (some might say ‘only’) platform is “everything the GOP is doing is wrong” with no idea as to what the ‘right thing’ is, it sounds like just another day in Bizarro-world to me.
Last time we had anyone campaignng on what they would actually do was back in 1994 - how long ago that seems…
~EdT.
[…] Over at the Moderate Voice, Michael van der Galien wonders why WaPo’s article harps on the Republicans, but the GOP told us that this was how they intended to campaign, and by golly, they finally delivered on something. (From factcheck.org) The ads being aired by both the NRCC and its rival, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, are overwhelmingly negative. However, the DCCC ads generally attack Republican candidates on policy issues or their performance in office – accusing them of casting votes favorable to drug or oil companies, or of supporting President Bush’s unpopular policies in Iraq or on Social Security. We’ve recently criticized factual inaccuracies we’ve seen in some of those, and we’ll have more to say in a later article. Here we focus on the NRCC’s ads, which are much more likely to demean an opponent’s character. That’s the very definition of political mudslinging. […]