Our view: Five of this year’s worst political advertisements
In the days leading up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, voters are being barraged by political advertisements. As usual, many are manipulative, misleading or just plain false. Here are five of the worst ads from this year’s crop:
Bad rap
Ads by the National Republican Congressional Committee in New York’s 19th congressional district might as well say: “Don’t vote for Antonio Delgado because he’s black.” That is because they focus almost exclusively on the occasional profanity in a rap CD that Delgado cut back in 2007. It is anyone’s guess what that has to do with what kind of congressman Delgado — a Harvard Law School graduate and Rhodes Scholar — would be. But the NRCC bets that the approach will pay dividends in a largely white district in the Hudson River Valley between New York City and Albany.
Cheap shot
In one of his first ads of the general election, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, attacks his opponent, Rep. Jim Renacci, for being a lobbyist. Fair enough: Lobbyists don’t win popularity contests. But Brown goes too far by saying Renacci lobbied “even while in Congress.” Renacci was a registered lobbyist before his election to the House in 2010, and his name remained on the registration rolls several months into his first term. But there is no evidence that he actually lobbied anyone during that time. Cheap shot overstatements like these fuel people’s cynicism about public service.
Kids as props
There is actually nothing false, misleading or unfair about an ad that Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis ran before the state’s GOP primary in August. Nonetheless, the ad — which is still helping define his candidacy in the general election — is jaw-dropping. It shows DeSantis teaching his daughter how to construct a wall with building blocks and him reading “The Art of the Deal” to his son. DeSantis is essentially saying: Vote for me and I’ll be President Donald Trump’s fawning lap poodle, and I don't mind using my kids as props.
Guilt by ancestry
Not long ago, Duncan Hunter was thought to be safe in his affluent Southern California House district, so much so that he attracted only token opposition, from 29-year-old Ammar CampaNajjar, a minor appointee in the Obama administration of Palestinian and Mexican-American heritage. Then Hunter and his wife were indicted on charges that they used campaign funds for personal use, and things got interesting. Hunter has been running ads linking Campa-Najjar to all manner of sinister terrorist plots, including trying to “infiltrate” Congress — by getting elected through the democratic process! Campa-Najjar does have a checkered family history. A deceased grandfather was a member of the terror group Black September during the 1970s. But CampaNajjar never met the grandfather and does not share his views. Hunter’s increasingly desperate approach might best be called guilt by ancestry.
Ludicrous link
Ohio Democratic House candidate Aftab Pureval is a Tibetan-IndianAmerican with a love of ballroom dancing. As these are hardly things likely to get Cincinnati-area voters riled up, Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, has tried to link him to — where else? — Libya. In one ad it says, “Pureval’s lobbying firm made millions helping Libya reduce payments owed to families of Americans killed by Libyan terrorism.” There are so many things wrong with this that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Actually, Pureval’s “lobbying firm” was the multinational law firm White & Case, where he worked on antitrust matters. He had nothing to do with Libya. Other lawyers at the firm helped negotiate a deal between the Libyan and the U.S. governments that paid $1.5 billion to the families of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The 2008 deal was generally regarded as a positive development. Only in the fact-challenged world of political ads could it be portrayed as some sort of devious sellout.