No Holds Barred Negative Ad Campaigns To Rule The Roost

As the general-election season heats off, it is becoming increasingly clear that the undecided voter will play a crucial role in deciding who the next President will be. Both Obama and Romney are paying crucial attention to the contents of their forthcoming ad campaigns. Both are virtually competing with each other to weave the same set of numbers, into palatable and credible stories for a skeptical audience.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics advises Mr. Romney to concentrate on the economy. He says, “His key will be to make [economic] data sing in short, punchy TV ads. Taken together, the ads should simply answer, in the negative, Ronald Reagan’s famous question from his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

However, Mr. Sabato feels that the President’s task is not as simple, “He has to use his ads to convince voters that they are better off, even when they may not feel they are. Selective use of economic data is key. He must stress the positive — remind viewers of his domestic and foreign-policy accomplishments in his first term.”

Sabato advises that Obama should also go negative, telling his voters, that if Romney wants you to believe that, my years as president were bad, voting him in, would be a change for the worse.

With super PAC’s opening their purses strings, it is estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on TV ads, targeting the undecided voters in about a dozen swing and battleground states, to bring him, to their way of thinking.

Nathan Gonzales, deputy editor of the Rothenberg Political Report, said “at this point both campaigns are using advertising as symbolic messages to reach party loyalists. They are trying to advance a narrative,” signaling a change in strategy.

What Obama has far conveyed can be read as, “Stick with me, I saved you from the Bush administration’s ruinous economic policies and am winning the war on terrorism because I killed Osama Bin Laden. I will also, unlike my opponent, look out for the 99%.”

And the Romney campaign is sayings, “I’m the guy who can fix the economy because I’m the true conservative job creator who will make America exceptional again through lower taxes and smaller government. My opponent promised change, but it’s been in the wrong direction.”

An Obama ad called “Swiss Bank Account” running in Iowa, Virginia and Ohio condemns Romney for outsourcing jobs as a businessman and governor and says it’s “just what you’d expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account.”

Similarly a coalition of conservative groups, Americans for Prosperity, is running ads attacking Obama in Florida, Nevada, and Virginia, and plans to spend about $100 million on TV advertising before Labor Day.

Founder of PoliticsInStero.com has predicted that “hundreds of millions of dollars” will be spent in the race to the White House. However, since “Swing voters aren’t paying attention right now and won’t be paying attention until after Labor Day,” the real spending will begin during summer and will be at its highest in early fall.

He also said that the ad campaigns will have ads that will manipulate the truth and twist it to their needs. They will be slanderous and malign the opponent and will, in general, be misleading. “The dirty secret about negative ads is that they work,” he concluded.