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A mellow campaign ad season? Negative

This year’s major races feature one volley after another on television

Friday, Oct. 13, 2006

In a new television ad for U.S. Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, the narrator tries to paint Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele as a tool of the Bush administration, citing his support for privatizing Social Security and the war in Iraq.

‘‘Michael Steele: Right for Bush, wrong for Maryland,” the narrator says.

Steele (R) fired back with an ad released Thursday in which he blames Cardin (D) and his own party for the problems in Washington.

‘‘Ben Cardin can’t change Washington, but you and I can,” Steele says in the ad.

It has become another volley in the remarkable air war waged by the candidates seeking to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D).

In the gubernatorial race, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley are slamming each other back and forth. Ehrlich (R) raps O’Malley (D) for his record on schools and crime. O’Malley has responded with endorsements from the county executives from Howard and Baltimore counties.

But the ads bombarding Maryland voters for the most part have been far from nasty this election season, at least compared with the charges and counter-charges leveled at the candidates in the U.S. Senate race in Virginia.

‘‘This is not Willie Horton [in Maryland], but they’re negative ads, no question,” said Matthew Crenson, a Johns Hopkins University political science professor. Because the ads attack the opponent rather than illuminating a candidate’s own position, they qualify as negative campaign advertising, Crenson said.

O’Malley has a 30-second ad — titled ‘‘Believe” — that casts a positive aura onto his campaign, with seemingly regular Marylanders and their issues: better health care and schools.

It also says: ‘‘We need leadership that works.”

‘‘Even if those are positive ads, there’s an underlying critique of Ehrlich,” said Shawn J. Parry-Giles, co-director of the University of Maryland’s Public Advertising Resource Center.

‘‘There’s no way to measure these things. There’s no scientific scale for negativity,” said Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org, a Web site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

FactCheck monitors advertising across the country. Jackson said one of the worst this season came from an organization called ‘‘votevets.org,” which has produced a series of ads against Republican incumbents for failing to send modern body armor to troops in Iraq.

‘‘That’s pretty sad, trying to capitalize on the deaths of American soldiers for political gain,” Jackson said.

And in the special election after Duke Cunningham’s resignation in California, the Republican candidate claimed the Democratic candidate supported a teacher who was accused of possessing child pornography. The ad pulled a quote out of context and failed to say that the Democrat had been the one to fire the teacher, Jackson said. ‘‘The important thing is whether the voters are being deceived or are given dependable information,” he said.

Two of the worst in Maryland have come from outside groups. The Maryland Fund has 15-second bits that try to paint Ehrlich as closely allied to George W. Bush. The National Black Republicans Association blames Democrats for Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan.

For Cardin’s latest ad against Steele and for several of Ehrlich’s ads, the campaigns have provided documentation for their claims — as if they were footnotes to a doctoral dissertation — on their Web sites.

‘‘We just wanted to make it clear that our ads are based on facts and every claim made by our ads is supported by facts,” Cardin spokesman Oren Shur said.

The documentation could well be a lesson from Sen. John F. Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and the charges from the Swift Boat Vets, said Zach P. Messitte, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at St. Mary’s College.

Swift Boat Vets fired allegations at the Massachusetts Democrat, who ignored them for weeks.

‘‘The lesson is getting filtered down to statewide candidates from the national level,” Messitte said.

Because of their pervasive nature, the ads of 2006 will provide lasting representations from the election. One of the most enduring images will likely be the snarling Boston terrier — black, white and Republican red.

It seems to growl, as if on cue, when Steele refers to the ‘‘nasty ads from the Washington crowd.” It was as if the candidate were steeling his supporters, playing defense before the offense took the field.

‘‘The lieutenant governor has dealt with for a long time these attacks, and these attacks have been coming,” campaign spokesman Doug Heye said.

Besides the attacks from ‘‘the Washington crowd,” Heye said Steele was also referring to the Oreo cookie incident at a 2002 debate and racist images on a liberal blog.

Observers say ads will get only more negative as the campaigns approach Election Day.

Whole books have been written that show the effectiveness of negative ads, Crenson said. ‘‘And responding to a negative ad with a positive ad doesn’t work,” he said. ‘‘It snowballs.”