The campaign commercial for Sarasota congressional candidate Tramm Hudson opens delicately, with happy upbeat music behind a former employee of his who recounts how ol' Tramm helped her get a new job when their bank was sold.
But the music turns ominous and the screen goes black and white when Hudson's opponent is mentioned. Vern Buchanan handled business matters differently from Hudson, the ad intones, pocketing millions for himself when his company went under and putting families out on the streets.
Within a few days of this ad hitting the airwaves, a six-month-old videotape of Hudson making a speech hit a Republican blog called RedStates.com under the headline, "Tramm Hudson destroys himself." In it, Hudson makes some racially insensitive remarks, stereotyping blacks as not being able to swim well, if at all. No one has fessed up to leaking the video, but apparently only two camps taped the speech back in February: Hudson's and Buchanan's.
Less than two weeks from the Sept. 5 primary, negative campaigning is in full swing.
Hudson and Buchanan are the ostensible frontrunners in a four-way Republican primary race to replace Katherine Harris in the U.S. House of Representatives.
No doubt, their spat will hoist the naysayers of negative campaigning back onto their high horses. "Attack ads cheapen the political process." "Going negative just turns people off and keeps them at home instead of voting."
Hogwash.
I like negative campaigning. It is good for politics and helps people make decisions about their voting choices. It creates interest in campaigns where interest doesn't exist. It helps unseat incumbents who ought to be thrown out of office.
From Sarasota to Tampa Bay, the only races that are getting much notice are the ones that have gone negative. The rest toil in anonymity, with voters making largely uninformed choices.
In the Florida Senate race spanning Tampa-St. Petersburg, Kim Berfield and Frank Farkas — two Republican colleagues in the House — are waging the harshest war on either side of Tampa Bay. Berfield has reminded voters on numerous occasions of Farkas' junket last year to Canada with gambling interests. It is a trip he sought to hide, and once caught, he shrugged his shoulders in amazement that anyone could think it was improper. He should be attacked for it.
Farkas has, in turn, attacked Berfield for being supported by the insurance industry (fair game) and Scientologists (debatable).
Then there is Tom Gallagher's attack last week on frontrunner Charlie Crist. Gallagher called Crist "pro-choice," fighting words in a Republican primary. But the attack highlighted Crist's nuanced and changing stance on abortion, enough so that the St. Petersburg Times weighed in with a news story on the subject. Crist's position is fair game, even if you don't like Gallagher or agree with his pro-life rhetoric.
Granted, going negative is a whole lot easier than staying positive and on the issues.
Take it from experience: I sweated out many campaigns trying to find the right way to express the candidate's brilliant but wonkish solution to, say, a lack of on-call ambulances. But it took almost no time at all to go negative.
We went negative in the Bob Dillinger campaign to get an entrenched incumbent, Robert Jagger, out of the Pinellas Public Defender's Office so it could be modernized and have a stronger advocate for the criminally accused. Dillinger has been a great agent for change at the Pinellas County Courthouse.
When prospective clients came into my consulting office and led off the conversation with "I won't go negative," I showed them the door. I would take a client with no money; but I wouldn't take one who wouldn't do what it sometimes takes to win.
Negative campaigning works. And it doesn't keep voters away from the polls. Science bears this out.
A 2002 study at Rutgers said that while incumbents benefit from positive campaigning, challengers do better by going negative. Pretty self-evident, because if you are challenging an incumbent, you have to attack his/her record to convince voters they made a mistake last time they put him/her in office.
Those same researchers had found a year earlier that negative campaigns actually stimulate voter turnout. The only exceptions: in races with overwhelming amounts of attack ads, and in the case of independent voters, who are more turned off than partisans by negative ads.
Most voters also worry more about attack politics' impact on others, and not on themselves. A 2005 study done at Penn State University found that people overestimate the impact of attack ads on other people. Most respondents in that study said they weren't bothered by the ads but thought (wrongly, it turned out) that others would be. "This raises the question of whether our willingness to censor or restrict political speech could be a result of a rather paternalistic view that other people are more susceptible to media messages than we are," Penn State said in announcing the results.
Oh, and don't get it into your head that attack politics is anything new. In fact, the "golden age" of negative campaigning is generally considered to be from 1864 to the turn of the century — the 20th century. Even Abraham Lincoln's re-election campaign featured negative messages. The Great Emancipator's supporters called his opponent, Gen. George McClellan, "Little Mac," "Little Napoleon," "the Ball's Bluff strategist," "the Chickahominy hero" and the "Gunboat General," and added that only a "full-fledged Traitor" or "coward" would possibly considering voting for him, according to the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.
Sometimes it pays to slam your opponent.
Honest, Abe.
Political Whore can be reached by e-mail at wayne.garcia@weeklyplanet.com, by telephone at (813) 739-4805 or on our blog at www.blurbex.com.
This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2006.