It’s negative ad nauseam to bitter end
Democrats coddle rapists! They want to Taser schoolgirls! They “pay for sex, not soldiers!” Welcome to the final days of a provocative - or, perhaps, increasingly desperate - Republican campaign to keep control of Congress. Former President Bill Clinton summed up this year’s GOP message as: “If you elect the Democrats they’ll tax you into the poor house, and on the way, you’ll meet a terrorist on every corner, and when you try to run away, you’ll stumble over an illegal immigrant.”
Here we are, a week away from Election Day…and it just seems to be getting worse, doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s just that my faulty memory forgets how bad the last election was by the time the next one rolls around. Perhaps this election cycle really isn’t any worse than 2004. My sense of things, however, is that the tenor of discussion and debate has sunk so low that we have to look up to see the bottom.
It’s not as if Republicans have any accomplishments to run on, and the negative ads emanating from the GOP are truly sickening. Honestly, though, while Republicans are by far the worst offenders, too many Democrats have slime on their hands as well. The sad reality is that negative ads work, and it sure is a whole lot easier than actually discussing issues. The problem with the negative ads is that they hold politicians up to ridiculously high standards of reasonableness- standards that no human could possibly hope to uphold. If you’re running for office, and one of your classmates caught you playing with yourself in the boys’ bathroom in secong grade…well, you can bet that it just might be fodder for your opponent to use in a negative ad (Candidate X is a PERVERT!!).
Who cares what a candidate said or did in 1973? Who cares that Candidate X engaged in an act of self-gratification with a Playboy magazine at a Mets game when he was 15? Does any of this matter? We’re all human beings, and we’ve all done stupid things over the course of our lives. When it comes to sex and alcohol, most of us have done some REALLY stupid things. Does that render us unqualified for public office in the here and now? Are we really that hypocritical? Do I really need to answer that?
Are you like me…eagerly awaiting November 8th, when we can get back to at least TRYING to deal with the real problems we face? Can we just talk about some issues? Please??
