New York Times, Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2006
New Campaign Ads Have a Theme: Don’t Be Nice
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — Republicans and Democrats began showing at least 30 new campaign advertisements in contested House and Senate districts across the country on Tuesday. Of those, three were positive.

For Republicans, it was the leading edge of a wave of negative advertisements against Democratic candidates, the product of more than a year of research into the personal and professional backgrounds of Democratic challengers.

“What do we really know about Angie Paccione?” an announcer asks about a Democratic challenger in Colorado. “Angie Paccione had 10 legal claims against her for bad debts and campaign violations. A court even ordered her wages garnished.”

For Democrats, it was part of a barrage intended to tie Republican incumbents to an unpopular Congress, criticize their voting records, portray them as captives to special interests and highlight embarrassing moments from their business histories.

In Tennessee, Democrats attacked Bob Corker, a Republican candidate for Senate, saying his construction company had hired illegal immigrants “while he looked the other way.”

The result of the dueling accusations has been what both sides described on Tuesday as the most toxic midterm campaign environment in memory. It is a jarring blend of shadowy images, breathless announcers, jagged music and a dizzying array of statistics, counterstatistics and vote citations — all intended to present the members of Congress and their challengers in the worst possible light. Democratic and Republican strategists said they expected over 90 percent of the advertisements to be broadcast by Nov. 7 to be negative.

At the national level, the two parties are battling over issues like national security and the war in Iraq. But Congressional races play out on local airwaves, and the flood of commercials amounts to a parallel campaign, one that is often about the characters of individual challengers and obscure votes cast by incumbents. Frequently lost in the back-and-forth are the protests of candidates who say the negative advertisements are full of deliberate distortions and exaggerations.

While Democrats have largely concentrated their efforts on the political records of Republicans, the Republicans have zeroed in more on candidates’ personal backgrounds.

Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said his investigators had been looking into prospective Democratic challengers since the summer of 2005.

“These candidates have been out there doing other things — they have never seen anything like this before,” Mr. Reynolds said of the Democratic challengers.

“We haven’t even begun to unload this freight train,” Mr. Reynolds said.

Democrats are learning just how deeply the Republicans have been digging. John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who is running for a House seat, has spent much of the past few days trying to explain editorials unearthed by Republican researchers and spotlighted in new advertisements. Mr. Yarmuth wrote the editorials for his student newspapers, and in them he advocated the legalization of marijuana, among other things.

Across the airwaves, Democratic challengers are being attacked for having defaulted on student loans, declaring bankruptcy, skipping out on tax bills, and being a lobbyist, a trial lawyer or, even worse, a liberal.

Steve Kagan, a doctor and Democrat running for Congress in Wisconsin, is being attacked for having sued patients who did not pay their bills. “Why not just tell the truth, Dr. Millionaire?” said an advertisement shown Tuesday.

Heath Shuler, the former Washington Redskins quarterback running for Congress as a Democrat in North Carolina, is being attacked in advertisements for owning a business that was late in paying $69,000 in back taxes.

Democrats are equally aggressive in their advertisements, going after Republicans on votes, ties to campaign contributors and, in the case of challengers, their own personal foibles. In one Democratic advertisement, the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff is shown in shadows wearing a hat as an announcer notes that he made contributions to Representative J. D. Hayworth, Republican of Arizona.

Democrats are even attacking Republicans on what should be their signature issue, taxes, most recently in an upstate New York race between State Senator Raymond A. Meier, a Republican, and Michael A. Arcuri, a Democrat, to fill an open Republican seat. “Raymond Meier raised taxes in Oneida County,” the announcer says. “Meier raised taxes in Albany. What do you think he’ll do” in Washington?

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that relatively inexperienced candidates might be vulnerable, but that Republicans had even worse problems this year, with a record of votes that he said had provided a steady stream of damaging information for Democratic campaigns.

“Let me tell you: candidates with lesser name identification are vulnerable to being defined,” Mr. Emanuel said. “But candidates who are associated with an institution are also vulnerable. There are two sides to this sword.”

While some public officials have criticized negative advertisements as destructive and blamed them for discouraging voter turnout, other analysts say they have come, if only by default, to play an important role. At a time of diminishing local news coverage of House and Senate races, they are one of the few ways in which voters learn about the candidates and their positions.

“Negative ads are more likely to talk about policy than positive ads,” said Joel Rivlin, deputy director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitors political advertising. “How else do you find out about the flaws of a candidate besides a negative ad?”

Incumbent Republicans and, to a lesser extent, Democrats are being attacked on their voting records and positions taken on issues large and small.

With dollar figures scrolling across the screen, Democrats belittled Republicans for taking money from oil companies, suggesting that was a reason for high gasoline prices. “Drake voted for billions in tax breaks for the oil and gas industry,” said a Democratic advertisement aimed at Representative Thelma Drake, Republican of Virginia. “She gets her way, big oil and gas get theirs.”

In a blizzard of conflicting advertisements, Republicans and Democrats in all regions of the country are accusing one another of supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants or providing government benefits to them.

Bruce Braley, a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Iowa, attacked his opponent, Mike Whalen, on Social Security. “He actually backed George Bush’s half-baked plan to privatize Social Security,” an advertisement said. Mr. Whalen accused Mr. Braley, in his own advertisement, of wanting to pull out of Iraq and thus “risk the safety of our troops to advance his extreme liberal agenda.”

Mr. Emanuel said he had warned his candidates about this part of the campaign, though he made a practice of waiting until after they had signed on to run. “I tell them: ‘I’m glad you’re running. Now get ready. This is a tough business. This is the hellfire you are going to go through,’ ” he said.

Mr. Reynolds has long believed that it would be this kind of information about Democratic challengers and not voter opinion on, say, President Bush or the war in Iraq that would determine whether Republicans held Congress this year. By way of example, he pointed to the case of Mr. Shuler.

“When he was a quarterback, it didn’t matter that he wasn’t paying $69,000 in taxes,” Mr. Reynolds said. “When you run for Congress, it matters.”

Mr. Reynolds burst out laughing when asked why he was not using more positive advertisements. “If they moved things to the extent that negative ads move things, there would be more of them,” he said.