Dollarocracy (24 page)

A more recent example comes from the 2004 presidential race between Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush. Kerry held a lead over Bush in the polls coming out of the conventions. Kerry made a big deal out of his record as a decorated soldier in Vietnam and campaigned with his “band of brothers,” the term for his fellow Vietnam veterans. The contrast with Bush, who had ducked military combat in the Vietnam era, was expected to work to Kerry's advantage. Then a shadowy independent group—Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—ran a series of TV ads asserting that Kerry was actually a coward who had betrayed his “brothers” while in Vietnam. The ads were bogus and repudiated by the likes of Senator John McCain, but the issue became the hot topic of the campaign for weeks. The Kerry campaign was staggered by the charges and eventually lost a nail-biter in November. “For Republicans a swift boat was a very good thing,” columnist Robert Novak stated about the 2004 election. It “kept John Kerry from being president.”
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The 2008 presidential race certainly featured a fair share of slash-and-burn television. Toward the bitter end of a Democratic primary contest, Hillary Clinton's campaign took a swipe at Barack Obama's perceived inexperience on the international stage with a television ad that featured a ringing phone at 3
AM
and the question “It's 3
AM
and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” That fall, the Republican National Committee doubled down on the theme, airing ads that asked, “Would you get on a plane with someone who has never flown? . . . Would you go under
with a surgeon who has never operated? Can you hand your nation to a man who has never been in charge of anything? Can you wait while he learns?”
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But the 2008 campaign, still operating under the old,
pre-Citizens United
rules—and influenced at least in part by the mutual regard Obama and Republican presidential nominee John McCain had for each other—was gentle compared with what was to come.

Almost a year before the actual vote, in a December 2011
New York Times
column, Paul Krugman wrote, “Welcome to post-truth politics,” and he predicted that if Mitt Romney were the Republican nominee, America would witness a campaign “based . . . around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn't done and believing things he doesn't believe.”
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Romney delivered just that, with a campaign slathered in money and untethered from fact. To be sure, Democrats and their super-PAC supporters made outrageous statements during the course of the 2012 campaign; and it is appropriate that they were fact-checked and called out.

But nothing rivaled the remarkable closing claim by Romney that Obama had somehow paved the way for the shuttering of America's Jeep plants. Jeeps are made in Toledo, Ohio, where the iconic American vehicle has been produced since 1941, and Romney needed to win Toledo and the rest of northwest Ohio if he were to stand a chance of securing the battleground state that was key to the presidency. Two weeks before the election, Romney went to the region and shocked voters by suggesting, “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.”
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The story, an October 22, 2012, report by Bloomberg News, had specifically stated that “Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. [Fiat/Chrysler executive Mike] Manley referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.” Yet Romney spoke of the company that manufactures Jeeps moving all its production to China.

The statement stirred fundamental fears in a region that had been battered by plant closings. So much so that Jeep's parent company, Chrysler, rushed to explain that Romney was completely, totally, incredibly wrong. “Let's set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China,” announced Chrysler. Company spokesman Gualberto Ranieri said that Romney had remade the facts so
aggressively that “it is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.”
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It was front-page news, nightly television news.

In the old days, a chastened Romney would have apologized and moved on. But in the new age of commercial carpet-bombing, Romney's response to being caught in a lie was to lie even more. The Romney campaign began airing an ad on Ohio television stations that claimed President Obama had, with the auto bailout that saved domestic vehicle production, “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.” The ad concluded that Romney—whose Bain Capital enterprise was identified as “a pioneer of outsourcing”—“will fight for every American job.” Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said of the Romney campaign's attempt to suggest that Obama had engineered a change in Jeep's status that would see the Toledo plant shuttered and its more than 3,500 workers idled, “They are inviting a false inference.” The
Washington Post
“Fact Checker” site reviewed Romney's ad and declared, “The overall message of the ad is clearly misleading—especially since it appears to have been designed to piggyback off of Romney's gross misstatement that Chrysler was moving Ohio factory jobs to China.” The pushback from Obama's backers and his campaign was even more aggressive. Former president Bill Clinton flew to Ohio and decried Romney's claim as “the biggest load of bull in the world.” Vice President Joe Biden said, “I have never seen anything like that. It's an absolutely, patently false assertion. It's such an outrageous assertion that, one of the few times in my memory, a major American corporation, Chrysler, has felt obliged to go public and say, there is no truth.”
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But, ultimately, the Obama campaign recognized that simply correcting the record was not enough. Romney had unleashed his nuclear arsenal. Obama had to return fire. An Obama campaign ad announced that “now, after Romney's false claim of Jeep outsourcing to China, Chrysler itself has refuted Romney's lie.” What was Romney's response? His campaign upped the television ad buy and went on radio with an even more aggressive message.

And the Obama campaign upped its ad buy.

Mutually assured destruction framed around the lie that an American president was trying to shutter the American automobile industry. Obama ultimately won the Toledo area and Ohio and the presidency. But at enormous cost.

Most false advertising, like political advertising in general, is done on television. But TV is, remarkably enough, a milder political battleground than radio. And if you want to see the real dark side, open your mailbox and read the targeted direct-mail attacks that Rove most favors. Or pick up your phone and listen to the most toxic form of negative advertising: push polling. “A push poll,” as a leading political science book defines it, “is essentially political advertising masquerading in the guise of legitimate scientific research, and it spreads lies, rumors, and innuendos about candidates.”
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The campaign attempts to influence or alter the view of selected respondents under the guise of conducting a poll, usually through telephone calls, and thereby facilitate entree to unsuspecting voters.
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Phony “pollsters” ask a bogus question meant to promote suspicion about the opposition candidate.

Lee Atwater was one of the first to champion the use of push polling in the 1980s. And Karl Rove was not far behind. Rove's most famous candidate, George W. Bush, used push polls in his 1994 bid for Texas governor against incumbent Ann Richards. Callers asked voters “whether they would be more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if they knew that lesbians dominated on her staff.”
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Perhaps the most famous use of push polls was in 2000 when it was alleged that George W. Bush's campaign used push polling to torpedo the campaign of Senator John McCain. South Carolina primary voters reportedly were asked, “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” The poll's allegation had no substance but was heard by thousands of primary voters.
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In the 2008 general election, Jewish voters in Florida and Pittsburgh were targeted by a push poll attempting to disparage Barack Obama by linking him with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Push polling is the poison gas warfare of political campaigns, and in some respects it can be seen as simply taking negative advertising to its logical conclusion. But it is controversial for self-evident reasons and is always done surreptitiously. (In each of the 1994 and 1996 election cycles, there were credible reports of push polling in at least three dozen races.)
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Campaigns that get caught with their fingerprints on a push poll can suffer blowback . . . if
the discovery is made before Election Day and if there is a news media hawking the situation. That is why push polling, like the Kerry Swift Boat ads, is best done by third-party groups formally independent of the campaign so that campaigns have plausible deniability. Push polling is most effective when it is compatible with softer messages being done in the campaign's own attacks on the opposition, creating an echo effect and a sense that where there is smoke, there must be fire. The current environment is ideally suited to this caliber of campaigning.

Defenders of negative TV political advertising—no one defends push polling, to our knowledge—acknowledge it has a seamy underside. Their response, however, has been that the solution is to return fire with fire. “Responding to ads with ads,” Glenn Richardson wrote, “is perhaps the most appropriate redress to distorted charges.”
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“Any ad from one candidate or party can always be countered with an ad by the opposing candidate or party,” Ridout and Franz stated, adding, “This is a particular strength of television compared with other forms of campaigning.”
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“Advertising provides a visible and relatively effective way to respond to attacks,” another team of researchers led by Franz argued. “For every thirty-second distortion, there can be a thirty-second clarification; every accusation can be met, every charge responded to in an effective, efficient way.” These researchers chastised John Kerry for failing to respond to the Swift Boat attack ads right away and with full fire, much as others criticized Dukakis for failing to answer the Willie Horton charges in 1988.
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In 2012, serious candidates took this advice to heart. Both presidential campaigns were prepared to respond almost instantly to attacks against them and to return fire. Ads could travel from their “edit suites” to TV stations for immediate airing within hours. During September, the Obama campaign was rotating twenty unique ads among sixty markets and had the capacity to shift those ads at a moment's notice.
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One account said that the campaigns could get a fresh ad on the air “within an hour” if need be.
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Franz and his colleagues, to their credit, acknowledged that the amount of money it takes to respond to attack ads has become more than a little daunting. It allows those with the most money to set the agenda for the campaign with bogus and/or irrelevant negative charges and forces the opponent to respond with gobs of money or let the charges appear legitimate. Psychological research
indicates that there is a great advantage to playing offense, not defense, and to be the first to levy charges against an opponent.
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By this logic, the offended party would be wise to shoot first and force the other candidate to respond to the negative ad blitz. “Even principled politicians are under enormous competitive pressure to succumb to a manipulative politics of unreason,” Bruce Ackerman wrote. “After all, if your opponents will batter you with hot-button sound bites, it won't do your principle much good if you lose the election. The only good defense is a sound-bite offense!”
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In our view, that is more than a minor drawback to an otherwise functional democratic election system. It is absurd and disastrous. For fear of being repetitive, we want to say that playing offense is eerily close to embracing the mutually assured destruction of nuclear war games. But it is American electoral politics.

And, tragically, that is not the worst aspect of negative political advertising.

What is most striking about negative television political advertising is that it accentuates the tendency toward depoliticization. Countering the legitimate concerns people have that the great problems facing the nation require political solutions by a democratic state is an immense and overwhelming centrifugal force driving rational people away from the political system. It logically follows from the clear purpose of negative advertising: to turn prospective voters off from the candidates they are most likely to support.

Instead of being a “struggle of ideas,” Franz maintained, attack-ad-based “elections are now about convincing people that the other guy is dangerous for America.”
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All ads seem idiotic and deceptive, so the wise course is to just abandon politics altogether. As one observer put it, “The only practical course for now is to believe nothing.”
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Even appealing candidates spend what seems like nearly all their time hassling their supporters for even more donations to pay for their own arsenal of negative ads or for responses to their opponent's negative ads. Why make a donation if the money is to pay for such slobbering nonsense? Let the billionaires cough up for such idiocy. They will win in the end anyway.