The conventional wisdom says there are two kinds of campaign commercials: positive ads, which elaborate on a candidate's own strengths, and negative ads, which shine a spotlight on an opponent's weaknesses. Running positive ads is supposedly evidence of political virtue (or a comfortable lead in the polls), while a candidate who broadcasts negative ads is desperate and nasty and has descended into the political gutter.
But this distinction between positive and negative ads obscures more than it illuminates. An ad pointing out that, say, one's opponent opposes drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is no more sleazy (as long as it is accurate) than an ad lauding one's own support for such drilling. Nor is the negative drilling ad any more intrinsically powerful than the positive one. Much more useful, then, is the distinction between policy-oriented and character-oriented ads--and, in particular, between policy-oriented and character-oriented negative ads.
The reason this distinction matters is that character-oriented negative ads--which one might think of as political black magic--are both more potent and more pernicious than policy-oriented negative ads. They are more potent because they can quickly depict an opponent as temperamentally unsuited for office. Compare, for instance, the claim that John Kerry or Barack Obama plans to raise Americans' taxes with the charges that Kerry is a windsurfing flipflopper and Obama is a substance-free celebrity. The tax-hiking assertion can be challenged directly (e.g. Kerry and Obama would actually cut most people's taxes) or counterbalanced by other policy arguments (e.g. the extra revenue would balance the budget or provide universal health care).
On the other hand, the flipflopper and celebrity charges are nearly impossible to rebut thanks to their reliance on images and stereotypes rather than facts. Simple adverse narratives about a candidate's character also resonate with voters in a manner that policy-oriented negative ads can almost never match. Higher taxes have their uses, after all, but no one could want a president who lacks a backbone or who is nothing but a frothy Hollywood concoction. It should therefore come as no surprise that Kerry lost in 2004 or that Obama's polling lead largely evaporated once John McCain began airing his celebrity ads. Black magic works.
But it is also black, largely because it tends to prevent voters from rationally evaluating candidates. Character-oriented negative ads do not seek to educate voters about issues or to explain why one candidate's policies are preferable to another's. They do not even argue that one candidate's judgment and experience are superior to his opponent's. They are, instead, deliberate efforts to make voters cast their ballots for all the wrong reasons. The hope is that people will vote against Kerry the flipflopper or Obama the celebrity without ever giving serious thought to the candidates' visions for the country. If the black magician has cast his spell properly, a simplistic and unfavorable character narrative drives voting decisions while more substantive considerations fall by the wayside. Politics is reduced to its lowest common denominator.
Character-oriented negative ads are also highly inaccurate. Was Kerry really more of a flipflopper than most politicians? Was flipflopping (along with a little windsurfing) really the essence of his political identity? Similarly, does Obama really offer less substance than most politicians? Is there really no difference between him and an empty-headed Hollywood starlet? To ask these questions is to answer them. In reality, Kerry had a long record as a moderate liberal, and his positions were no more fickle than those of most of his Senate peers. And Obama is plainly a serious and substantive candidate, whose message of hope and change is complemented by detailed proposals on every issue under the sun. The viewer of the flipflopper and celebrity ads, however, is left with precisely the opposite impression. Those ads are thus grossly distorting at best. Less charitably, one might call them lies.
As the Kerry and Obama examples indicate, the two parties have not been equally willing to resort to black magic in recent years. The flipflopping charge was central to George W. Bush's 2004 campaign, while McCain has produced a whole series of celebrity ads and aired them heavily. Kerry never launched an analogous attack on Bush's character in 2004, nor has Obama to date broadcast anything even remotely comparable to McCain's celebrity commercials (which include, inter alia, comparisons of Obama to Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and God, and statements that "hot chicks dig Obama" and that he is "Dreamy!"). These facts are important to keep in mind as the 2008 campaign continues to unfold. So far at least, one candidate has resisted the lure of black magic while the other has seemed to revel in it. McCain should be roundly condemned for employing the very tactics--ads that distort the truth and subvert rational decision-making--that he used to denounce.
But for Democrats, of course, the burning question is not whether McCain should be criticized but what Obama should do now that he has become the victim of character-oriented negative ads. Kerry's experience in 2004, in particular with the scurrilous Swift Boat attacks on his war record, established that doing nothing is not a viable strategy. Candidates may prefer not to dignify blatantly unfair ads with a response, but adverse character narratives quickly become entrenched when they are not aggressively rebutted. For many Americans, Kerry, who responded slowly and tentatively to the black magic that was unleashed against him, remains a spineless flipflopper who just may have lied about his service in Vietnam.
To his credit, Obama has not ignored McCain's celebrity ads. Shortly after the ads aired, he criticized the McCain campaign for wanting to talk about Britney and Paris instead of the country's real problems. The Obama campaign also released response ads, one decrying McCain's reliance on the "same old politics," another asserting it is McCain who is actually "Washington's biggest celebrity." Unfortunately, these measures have had only a limited impact. Obama's polling lead remains notably smaller than before the celebrity ads began, and a study found that his own anti-McCain celebrity commercial did nothing to move public opinion. (On the other hand, Obama does remain ahead in the polls, and the celebrity narrative does not seem to have stuck quite as well as the flipflopper tag in 2004.)
Ultimately, the quandary that Obama may be rapidly approaching is whether he wants to lose with dignity or win via some black magic of his own. The 2004 election showed that doing nothing in response to character-oriented negative attacks is honorable but foolhardy. So far, this campaign seems to be demonstrating that vigorous pushback, while preferable to dignified silence, reduces the damage but does not undo it. Sadly, the only way to restore the status quo ante may be for the Obama campaign to try to stamp its own adverse character narrative on McCain. Maybe he is a confused old man, or maybe a volatile hothead, or perhaps a pampered plutocrat. All these lines of attack are about as unfair as the Kerry-as-flipflopper and Obama-as-celebrity charges, and in a perfect world Obama would not resort to them. But if the race continues to tighten, he too may have to select between victory and honor, black magic and white. McCain has already made his choice. Obama's moment of decision is nigh.
UPDATE: I wrote the above post while on vacation in Greece last week. Since then, of course, Obama has bashed McCain for forgetting how many houses he owns and chosen Joe Biden, the scrappy "son of Scranton," as his running mate. So it looks like the "pampered plutocrat" narrative has now officially been launched by the Obama campaign. For the first time in recent memory, Republicans and Democrats are playing with black magic.
