Negative Advertising

Is Vermont being flooded with negative political advertising?

That depends, as Bill Clinton might say, on what "negative" means.

If negative political advertising means pointed attacks on an opponent's record, then there's been a lot of it, and much of it has been in sound-bite sizes so small that it doesn't contribute much but rancor and confusion.

If negative advertising means attacks on character, however—the kind of character assassination that George W. Bush's "fast boat" squads leveled at Sen. John Kerry—the Vermont this campaign season has remained relatively free of it—pretty much.

Most of the criticism for negative advertising has swirled around the television ads of Rich Tarrant, who is trying desperately to make Vermonters take a second look at their longtime love affair with Bernie Sanders. Compared to hard-core negative ads, however, Tarrant's ads are not particularly shocking. They don't attack Sanders for being dishonest or improperly influenced, for instance. The closest they come to this is the tag line, "What's happened to Bernie?" a pretty mild query that implies that Sanders has lost track of his constituents' views while in Washington.

The better criticism of Tarrant's ads is not that they are negative, but that they are so shallow that they convey no useful information and end up being misleading. That, as noted by the Rutland Herald recently, is a general problem with TV ads.

Tarrant's complaint about Sanders' vote on the Amber Alert system, for instance, would seem to imply that Sanders is soft on child abduction. That thought is so absurd that it invites criticism of the ad rather than its intended target. The same was true with a subsequent ad implying that Sanders was opposed to child care credits as part of Bush's tax cuts. Ridiculous on its face.

Sanders has been careful not to take the gloves off in response. Not so his supporters, though. Newspapers have been beseiged regularly with letters that are more negative than anything Tarrant has put on the air—letters that question his honesty, claim he's trying to buy the election, etc. The letters have a similarity about them that is suspicious.

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Perhaps the most consistently negative campaign we see through candidate emails comes from the campaign of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Scudder Parker. Parker has the same problem as Tarrant in trying to discredit a popular incumbent, in this case Jim Douglas. He hasn't broadcast his negativity as frequently as Tarrant (he hasn't the money to do so), but the emails from his campaign are consistently negative about every aspect of Douglas' character and his administration, charging the governor with being underhanded and dishonest with the public. The emails have been so dogged (and occasionally petty) that they have become a bit of a joke within the press corps.

So far, the campaigns of Sen. Peter Welch and Gen. Martha Rainville have been refreshingly positive. That may be partly because they are nice people; but more likely it's because neither is an incumbent, so neither has a record of Congressional votes that could be attacked.