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Obama Airs More Negative Ads

Posted by JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor in Politics.
Sep 18th, 2008 | Comments

Yesterday, in my winning ways of our lying pols post, I pointed to Slate’s Farhad Manjoo asking Why isn’t Obama stretching the truth more often?

I don’t know if Obama took the advice, but today I read that he has gone negative:

In line with the expectations of most observers, the campaign has turned more negative since the conclusion of the Republican Convention. In the first week of advertising after the conventions, Obama aired a higher percentage of negative ads than did McCain. 56 percent of the McCain campaign ads were negative, while 77 percent of Obama’s ads were negative.

And, as Joe points out, he’s widened his lead over McCain to 4 points.

Thanks, Holly!

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roro80

The article is very interesting, because it points out how "negative" was defined for the purpose of these stats. I live in California, where I guess the candidates don't think they need to advertise at all (fine -- we all know we're going dem anyway, spend the money where it's useful), but just from the ads I've seen on the internet, the difference in the level of negativity between the two candidates is pretty wide. In one case, I've seen honest, issues-based ads about a candidate's views and how the views of his opponent are wrong downright dangerous. In the other case, I've seen pretty character smears, flip sarcasm, hints of racism, and outright lies about policy (for both the "approving" candidate and his opponent). With this in mind, it's pretty incredible to say that Obama is "more negative" than McCain.

But again, I haven't seen a single ad on TV, so maybe I've only seen the ads that really stir things up (think lipstick, britney, etc).

pacatrue

Yeah, the very next paragraph in the article you link to after the one you quote seems extremely relevant to assessing this claim. So here it is:

"If that seems like a surprising statistic, it's partially because McCain's negative ads have gotten a great deal more attention in the media than Obama's. That owes primarily to the McCain camp's repeated use of debunked claims. The number also has something to do with the project's definition of a negative ad: "any ad where the candidate's opponent was mentioned." In other words, a spot that spends 27 seconds on how great Candidate A is and 3 seconds on what a jerk Candidate B is would be categorized the same way as an ad that spends its entirety bashing Candidate B. So while these stats tell us what percentage of each candidate's ads mentioned the opposition, there's no gradation available as to how negative each campaign's ads were."

DLS

The rabid won't be satisfied unless Obama commits serious slander and worse.

He's probably never going to stoop that low; sorry, lefties -- unless he's desperate and it's time for an amplification as an October Surprise.

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