Hardball ads are effective -- and win elections

WASHINGTON - This just in: President Bush is a Hitlerian war criminal, his supporters goose-stepping Nazis. John Kerry is a traitorous liar. Dick Cheney believes the end of America is at hand. And President Clinton is responsible for those planes flying into the World Trade Center.

Welcome to America's 2004 electoral landscape, at least as it's seen through the fun house mirrors of political advertising. A misfired attempt at campaign reform, coupled with the anything-goes ethos of the Internet, has resulted in some of the most vicious presidential campaign ads in U.S. history.

''I've been around politics a long time, and I've never seen anything as nasty and as vicious as I have this year,'' says Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist.

Hardball ads have been around around since mass-media political advertising first caught on during television's infancy in 1952. But many political analysts believe 2004 is in a class by itself. They cite as evidence:

• The anti-Bush group MoveOn.org posted an ad on its Web site that used film of Adolf Hitler ranting in German, with subtitles ''translating'' his words into a fictitious quote by Bush. (''God told me to strike at al Qaeda . . .'') When Republicans bitterly complained, MoveOn.org took the ad down -- but promptly put up another one with more Hitler footage under the caption: WHAT WERE WAR CRIMES IN 1945 IS FOREIGN POLICY IN 2003.

• A group of Vietnam veterans calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth managed to dominate the political headlines throughout the entire month of August with a series of TV ads impugning Kerry's Vietnam war record. In just 30 seconds, one ad used the words lied or lying four times, the phrase not been honest twice, betrayed twice, and dishonored and cannot be trusted once apiece.

• The pro-Republican organization Citizens United made a TV spot featuring footage of various al Qaeda terrorist attacks staged during Clinton's presidency, then asked rhetorically: ``So who is responsible for leaving us vulnerable to terrorists?''

• Another MoveOn.org Internet ad portrays Vice President Cheney as a fear-monger by using a creatively edited video clip in which he appears to be chanting ''the beginning of the end of America'' -- when actually he was just quoting an al Qaeda member about the group's goals.

• An ad from a new anti-Bush group, Texans for Truth, debuted on the Internet last week and will began airing on TV today. It hints that Bush deserted his National Guard unit in Alabama three decades ago.

INDEPENDENT GROUPS

None of those ads come from the official Kerry or Bush campaigns. Rather, they were unleashed by purportedly independent groups known as 527s, after the section of U.S. law that makes them tax-exempt and allows them to accept unlimited contributions.

527s have existed for decades, but this year they're wallowing in dollars due to a 2002 campaign-reform law known as the McCain-Feingold Act that cracked down on campaign contributions to political parties and individual candidates.

Much of the money diverted from the parties has wound up in the coffers of 527s -- and analysts say their independence from the candidates makes them much more inclined to rough-and-tumble tactics.

''There is no doubt that current campaign-finance restrictions have channeled money into 527s that are functioning as negative-campaign specialists, creating ads that are in bad taste or debase the level of debate,'' says Williamson Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Insitute in California. ``527s, because they're separate from the candidates, are in a better psychological state to engage in gutter-level politics.''

Just how independent some of the 527s really are has been hotly debated. Both Kerry and Bush have charged that unfriendly 527s are coordinating their attacks with rival campaigns, and two men -- including the chief outside counsel -- had to resign from the Bush campaign after their connections with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were disclosed.

THIRD PARTY ATTACK

But even if their independence is an illusion, it offers public cover to the official campaigns.

''One of the main tactics in attack advertising is to use third parties to try to deflect the blame,'' says Joel Rivlin of the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, which analyzes political ads. ``Otherwise you run a risk of a backlash for negative advertising.''

The expansion of politics into the Internet has fed the trend. Since Howard Dean's abortive campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination first revealed the Internet's lucrative potential for raising money, both 527s and political parties are creating TV-style ads there to accompany fundraising pitches. Some of the most brutal ads, including the Hitler spots, have appeared only there. Even when the ads are yanked, as both Hitler ads were, they endure via e-mail.

''We see wilder stuff there than we could ever imagine on network TV,'' says Brooks Jackson, who monitors political ads for the University of Pennsylvania's FactCheck.org. ''The Internet is like the Wild West right now,'' agrees David Schwartz, chief curator of film at New York's American Museum of the Moving Image. ``There's going to be a lot of questions raised after the elections, about the different ads there and their impact.''

Schwartz has begun adding Internet ads to his collection of more than 1,000 presidential-campaign TV spots of the past five decades. Titled The Living Room Candidate, his exhibition can be seen at The Sixth Floor Museum At Dealy Plaza in Dallas, or online at www.movingimage.us.

As The Living Room Candidate documents, negative ads were right there at the birth of TV political advertising, when Adlai Stevenson ran spots warning that a Republican victory in 1952 would touch off a new Depression, and Eisenhower countering that a spineless Democratic administration had left America without enough tanks to fight the Korean War.

Attack ads turned into a malign art form in 1964 with Lyndon Johnson's so-called ''daisy'' spot that deftly painted his opponent Barry Goldwater as a trigger-happy nuclear cowboy.

The ad showed a little girl counting as she picked petals off a flower. Suddenly her voice changes into a man's doing an ominous countdown, followed quickly by film of an atomic explosion. ''Vote for President Johnson on November 3,'' an announcer intones. ``The stakes are too high for you to stay home.''

The daisy ad was the blueprint for virtually every negative political advertisement of the next 40 years, not only in style -- a reliance on a strong, emotional image rather than detailed argument -- but its methodology. It appeared as a paid ad only once, but lived on endlessly in news coverage of the resulting controversy.

''That's a classic example,'' says FactCheck.org's Jackson. ''When you get it into the news cycle, you hit the jackpot while hardly spending anything.'' It's the path taken by all the most effective negative political ads since, from the 1988 Republican spot that ripped Michael Dukakis for furloughing from prison a convicted murderer named Willie Horton, who proceeded to commit a home invasion and rape, to last month's Swift boat broadsides against Kerry.

DIFFERENT PERCEPTION

For all its impact in 1964, the daisy ad -- which didn't mention either Goldwater or the Republican Party -- would barely cause a ripple in the pond of today's bloody-shirt political advertising.

''I show it to my students and they really don't understand why it was so powerful politically,'' says the University of Virginia's Sabato. ``I have to explain it to them. There's no sex or -- well, there is some violence, the nuclear explosion -- and no vicious personal attacks that they can see.''

MoveOn.org, in fact, aired its own anti-Bush version of the daisy spot last year without any fuss like the one that accompanied the Hitler ad.

MoveOn.org officials argue that they've been unfairly criticized for the Hitler ads, which were actually entries in a contest the organization sponsored rather than something they produced. And, they add, negative advertising would continue to grow even if all the 527s went out of business tomorrow.

''The growth in attack ads stems from the feeling that they're relatively effective at breaking through the clutter and driving home the point with voters,'' says Adam Ruben, MoveOn.org's field director.

``From the daisy ad of 1964 to the Willie Horton ad of 1988, there's a strong tradition of attack ads, and the reason we remember them so well is that they worked -- they won elections.''