Campaign Ads – A Necessary Evil
But do they have to be SO evil? It seems the closer we get to Nov. 4, the nastier the political campaign ads gets. On the presidential front, both candidates are running their share of attack ads. The topic even took time out of the debate Wednesday night and left many people upset because they thought the time should have been spent discussing real issues, not who dealt the lowest blow. McCain has ads focusing on Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground group and Obama has ads that call McCain erratic and uncertain. Negative ads flood the state and local scene as well such as the commercial showing US Rep John Shadegg morphing into George Bush and republicans denouncing democrats liberal agendas. My question is: do negative campaign ads really work? It seems like right now America could use some good news and these ads are anything but optimistic. If only someone would run an upbeat ad like this one for John F. Kennedy. I know I’d be singing along.
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1 comment so far
Rosa says:
I think the negative campaign ads are the driving factor in deciding which candidate gets the popular vote. The reason they are so effective is that most voters do not understand how each of the candidates feels about all of the issues. This leaves the sad truth that elections are all about perceptions.
People will not only be making assumptions based on appearances, but many of them will only have this to go off due to their lack of education on the topics. The negative campaigns are great tools to simplify in a positive way the position of one candidate. However, they do this by presenting the candidates as dichotomies, where the good one is easily pointed out from evil one. That’s right! They are aggressive and vicious when making attacks against their opponents.
So are these ads ethical? Not likely, but who really is to say anything if the ads are making such interesting television while giving the general public Cliff Notes versions of who each candidate is. It goes something like this: “Oh, I can’t believe Obama would do that,” or “McCain is going to increase the poor man’s taxes?”
So, I think if voting is based on these negative campaign ads, our next president will be the politician we believe to be the least incompetent…. but incompetent nevertheless.