Ad Nauseam

Sally Ashley is sick of Gordon Smith bashing Jeff Merkley as a hot-dog-wolfing simpleton when it comes to foreign policy, and an enabler of rapists to boot.

She is just as sick of Merkley bashing Smith as a golf-absorbed aristocrat who cares more about his 9-iron than her Social Security check. She just wants to watch The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

“The negative ads I just think are awful,” says Ashley, a 75-year-old landlord living in Johns Landing. “It doesn’t matter who they are [for]. I see ‘Merkley, Merkley, Merkley,’ and I think it’s an ad for Merkley. And then it turns out to be Smith.”

She’s not the only Oregonian ready to flip channels at the first sign of a commercial. Since Labor Day, Oregon has been inundated with election-year advertising between Smith, a Republican running for his third term in the U.S. Senate, and Merkley, his Democratic challenger.

By any criteria—noise, numbers or nastiness—nothing in Oregon’s TV memory matches the din of Smith vs. Merkley with their ads and those by their interest-group allies attacking over timber payments, troop armor, kicker checks, home care for seniors, office furniture, Big Oil bailouts, hot dogs, golf clubs and rape. We’re not naïfs, but when a battle-seasoned strategist like Democratic consultant Mark Wiener says the race is the most cantankerous he’s seen in Oregon in a dozen years, we take notice.

“I think people are probably taken aback at the sheer volume of the stuff that’s coming across,” says Wiener. “As the stakes of these things get higher, so does the ‘ick’ factor. It’s just a river of negativity. As Bette Davis said, ‘Strap in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.’”

But here’s the question: Are these ads working?

WW decided to wash off the mud by talking to people who dig around in it for a living. We sat down with six political professionals—consultants, poli sci professors and pollsters—to analyze the TV ads that have run in the Smith-Merkley race. They chose four spots as the most memorable of this campaign. The exercise is not to gauge the ads’ accuracy but to assess their goals and effectiveness in achieving those goals.

“Often for TV ads, there are two different goggles,” Wiener says. “There are the goggles worn by people like me—political weasels, hacks, political consultants, operatives—and then there’s normal people.”

Normal people are fed up. To understand why, we’ve turned to the weasels—and the people who explain the weasels. We also asked our nice normal person, Sally Ashley, for her reaction to each of the Gang of Four commercials.

^Chew

FIRST AIR DATE: Sept. 3
FUNDED BY: The National Republican Senatorial Committee
CAMPAIGN GOAL: With Merkley still unknown to many Oregonians, Smith tries to attack one of his opponent’s supposed strengths: Merkley’s international-relations experience honed by a fellowship at the U.S. Department of Defense and a seven-year stint as president of the World Affairs Council of Oregon.

BILL LUNCH, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR: You have a foreign-policy issue that people may not remember, but they remember there was something going on between Russia and Georgia. And Jeff Merkley plainly looks the fool as he continues to eat his hot dog. Classic: You let the challenger show that they are a buffoon.
MARK WIENER, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: People like me would look at that ad and say, “Ah, gotcha!” And, you know, it’s sort of amusing. He’s trying to stuff his face with a hot dog. OK. Normal people, my guess, they look at that and go, “Are you kidding? That’s what you’ve got to say? And you’re looking at this guy eating a hot dog and talking about Georgia—which, by the way, I don’t give a rat’s ass about?”
GREGG CLAPPER, REPUBLICAN CONSULTANT: There’s a difference between comparative ads and really schlock ads. “Man, that guy can’t eat a hot dog worth a damn.” That’s not substantive advertising. That’s just crap.
SALLY ASHLEY, LANDLORD: That shows me that Jeff Merkley is eating lunch and he has something to do with Georgia. For me, for Gordon Smith to put that on is an advertisement for Jeff Merkley.

VERDICT:

^Matthew

MOORE: Very well produced. It shows Gordon Smith as he wants Oregonians to think about him: as an independent thinker who puts being an Oregonian and a human being first, over being a partisan player. It’s a classic along those lines.
WIENER: The battleground here is the mushy middle, you know, sort of the swingy people. It’s not so much that they love Ted Kennedy...although Ted Kennedy has brain cancer and now every time people think of him they begin to choke up a little. But aligning himself with Ted Kennedy, at least for the purpose of this spot, isn’t saying, “If you like Ted Kennedy, vote for me.” It’s a signifier that Gordon Smith is a different type of Republican.
KAUFMAN: There are voters in Oregon who feel they are “coming over” to vote for Barack Obama, [and] will be looking for a reason to support Smith. You’ve got two examples here of what Smith is using to get them: “Tiffany” (against Merkley) and Kennedy-plus-Smith (for Smith).
MOORE: The problem is, it may be too early. Because there’s going to be a slew of these other ads going on, and that backbiting, argumentative debate is going to continue in the ads. This one may not be enough to cut through all of that by the time voters actually get their ballots and cast their votes.
WIENER: Good ad. I don’t know what the strong belief is. But I guess it’s, “Don’t kill people.” I’m with that.
ASHLEY: Good ad. It’s truthful. He’s telling people what he’s done.

VERDICT:

In the past two weeks, the two candidates and their outside interest-group allies have combined to spend more than $6 million in television advertising, according to the expenditure-tracking firm hired by the Merkley camp. The result? Last week, from Oct. 14-20, Portland ABC affiliate KATU alone aired 483 ads connected to the Smith-Merkley race—an average of nearly three an hour.

KATU has already sold another 455 commercial slots for U.S. Senate race ads this week, Oct. 21-28.

“The total spending for both candidates and their support groups could approach $30 million in this race,” says a high-level Merkley adviser who is not authorized to speak for the campaign. “It’s already well over $20 million.”

Even observers who don’t think the ads are distasteful agree that their cumulative effect is exhausting.

“If people think it’s nasty, they’re wusses,” says Clapper. “It’s simply been so much money that you see them all the time and get fed up with them.”

And if you believe Smith and Merkley at their two debates, they too are tired of seeing these ads when the economy is sinking faster than NBC’s ratings and the war in Iraq threatens to run longer than Seinfeld in syndication.

In the Senate candidates’ second debate in Medford on Oct. 13, Smith struck a wistful note about the ads he and Merkley have run.

“Frankly, I regret the tone of the campaign,” he said. “I regret all the money flooding in from outside the state of Oregon that besmirches both of us. The Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee [sic] ran an ad with Jeff eating a hot dog...I think it’s wrong to belittle somebody in an ad like that. I would not have run that kind of ad. And I’m sorry it was run.”

Merkley was forgiving in public: “I really do like hot dogs.” He denied running any negative ads of his own, and said both campaigns “should sit down and ask these independent expenditures to quit their negative campaigning.”

Don’t hold your breath. For all the moralizing, campaigns run negative ads because, historically, they have worked. But none of this year’s ads has changed the game, according to our panel.

“Smith is going up against Mr. Vanilla,” Clapper says. “What are you going to say about the guy? The thing about the race is, when you think back on the ads, you really can’t remember any of them. I don’t see it moving numbers particularly well. Smith is losing points because he’s in a bad year with an ‘R’ after his name.”

With Election Day looming Nov. 4, Smith is in the fight of his political life. The most recent polls show him trailing Merkley by anywhere from 2 to 5 points. To win, he must make up ground in the face of an economy in free fall, a deep dislike for anything associated with incumbents or George W. Bush, and a shift since January of voter registration in Oregon from a Democratic advantage of 76,357 over Republicans to a 227,868-voter lead.

“Gordon Smith is in a desperate situation here,” Wiener says. “The tide is against him, the mood of this state is against him, and reality is against him.”

If this is, in fact, Smith’s last stand, it will be made on TV.

In the final sprint, Republicans have poured money into Oregon television advertising for the U.S. Senate race: more than $2.3 million for the week of Oct. 7-13 alone, according to Media Strategies and Research, an expenditure-tracking firm contracted by the Merkley campaign. Only $329,954 of that spending came from Smith’s own campaign. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and a small fleet of political action committees funded the rest.

The Merkley camp, though it says it outspent at a rate of more than 2-to-1, is waging its fight with the support of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Together, the campaign and the committee upped their ad buys from $927,246 the week of Oct. 7-13 to $1.1 million for the week of Oct. 14-20, according to the tracking firm.

And last Friday, Oct. 13, the DSCC debuted its latest broadside: an ad called “Peas,” featuring WW’s revelations of undocumented workers at Smith Frozen Foods. “Gordon Smith: What a hypocrite,” the commercial concludes.

“This one stands out visually, although it looks like a field of basil,” says Moore. “But the message is just more of the barrage of charges both candidates and their allies are throwing at each other. The only effect it might have is to drive the more anti-immigrant yet still mainstream Republican voters to vote for [Constitution Party candidate Dave] Brownlow.”

The barrage of claims and counterclaims reminds some observers of Smith’s first race for U.S. Senate, a 1996 special election against Ron Wyden that turned nasty.

Wyden won then with what Wiener calls “political jujitsu”: pulling his negative ads from the air with three weeks left in the race, and even playing the song “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” before his rallies.

But no weasel worth his campaign donations thinks that kind of ploy would work this year, when the Republican brand has been so devalued. In fact, Smith’s best hope may be to run enough negative ads that even Obama voters are so turned off that they don’t bother to vote in the U.S. Senate race at all. It’s called “roll-off,” and many strategists think it’s the best reason for negative campaigning.

“The strategy for Gordon Smith [is] pretty straightforward,” says Bergstein. “He has to make Merkley the issue, make him unacceptable to the voters for a variety of different reasons, and shrink the electorate. If it’s a referendum on Merkley, he’s got a chance; if it’s a referendum on himself, he’s got a tougher chance…unless he’s got a very riveting message that says, ‘Here’s what I’ve done for Oregonians.’”

Here’s one positive: The ads certainly haven’t turned off Sally Ashley, who was at the Multnomah County Elections Division on Oct. 16, helping a sick friend vote by absentee ballot. Ashley’s already turned in her vote.

She’s voting for Smith. “He was the first Republican to go against Bush,” she says.

^Ad-Lib: Smear your friends!

Why should candidates for major political office be the only ones who get to be the targets of negative ad campaigns? Why can’t your friends and family enjoy the experience of being publicly associated with unsavory elements? Now they can! Just insert their names into the “ad lib” below, along with some appropriately scandalous nouns. They won’t know how to thank you.

______________________ says he’s on the side of working families. So how does s/he explain ______________________?

Who is the real ______________________? While Oregon’s taxpayers were struggling to fill their tanks, ______________________ was palling around with ______________________. Why the double standard?

______________________ says s/he supports ______________________. So why, in 1998, did he vote 24 times to cut funding to _____________________?

Would you trust ______________________ and the extreme ______________________ agenda with your ______________________?

______________________ claims s/he wants to clean up Salem/Washington. So why does ______________________ support special interests like ______________________, elite ______________________ and ______________________ rapists?

______________________: S/he’s more of the same.