Negative Ads

PLEASE PAY attention, because we're only going to run through this once or, if need be, a hundred and forty-seven times, to make sure everybody gets it straight. It's about negative politicking, and Jews and Democrats, and the friends of Parris Glendening who do not wish to stand beside him.1. Negative political campaigning: You got a problem with this? Not me. Ellen Sauerbrey does, but that's because Parris Glendening is making claims against her that she wishes nobody would remember.He keeps telling people she's voted consistently against abortion rights.

NEW YORK -- The voters here are being treated to a throwback political campaign in the contest for mayor between Democratic incumbent David N. Dinkins and Republican challenger Rudolph W. Giuliani.Just a year after an incumbent president was unseated because he didn't pay enough attention to the serious concerns of the electorate, the campaign here has become just what New York mayoral campaigns always seem to become -- an exchange of attacks and negative commercials, a parade of prominent people offering their endorsements, an intense get-out-the-vote campaign and far more heat than light.

WARREN, Mich. -- Democrat Bill Clinton sharpened a new edge yesterday in his attack on President Bush, taunting the incumbent as a "do-nothing" president and an opponent afraid to debate in this key Midwestern state tomorrow.And he unabashedly launched the campaign's first negative television advertisement, even though it is Mr. Clinton who has the double-digit lead in the polls only six weeks from the election.Although a bipartisan commission canceled the first proposed presidential debate after Mr. Bush declined to attend, Mr. Clinton launched a three-day swing through Michigan and Illinois that will end tomorrow in East Lansing, the town disappointed by cancellation of the debate.

DES MOINES, Iowa -- The presidential race is heating up: Candidates are slinging elbows in debates, flaying each other in speeches and siccing media people on their rivals. The question is which candidate takes the next step: airing the first negative advertisement of the 2008 campaign. "We've seen swiping and sniping," said media analyst Evan Tracey. "The natural progression is to take that to the airwaves and put it in an ad." But it's not that straightforward. While voters may assume that negative campaigning is the natural order of things, the launching of an attack ad is one of the most difficult and important tactical decisions a campaign can make.

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. -- At a Q-and-A session with voters here the other night, a woman asked Democratic Rep. Alan Wheat why he wasn't responding on television to hard-hitting, negative ads being aired by former Republican Gov. John Ashcroft, his opponent for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Republican John Danforth."

As Valerie H. Twanmoh greeted voters outside Youth's Benefit Elementary School, the smile on her face hid her frustration. The Democrat was making her third try at winning a seat on the County Council representing Fallston and Abingdon, and it had seemed as though things could be breaking her way. But she was disheartened by an eleventh-hour mailer sent out by her opponent, Republican Councilwoman Veronica L. "Roni" Chenowith. It portrayed Twanmoh as a big-developer ally who had been booted from her job as zoning hearing examiner.

Gov. Martin O'Malley has opened a 14-point lead over former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. in their gubernatorial rematch, solidifying his Democratic base and winning over independents while his rival struggles to capitalize on the voter anger that is propelling Republicans in other parts of the country, according to a Baltimore Sun poll. Democrats who had been undecided during the summer are lining up behind O'Malley, who enjoys wide margins in the vote-rich Washington suburbs of Montgomery and Prince George's counties and has a narrow edge in the Baltimore suburbs — regions where Ehrlich had hoped to make inroads.

Washinton -- WHEN EVER an independent political group runs a negative TV ad there is always the suspicion that it is acting with the approval or at least the acquiescence of the individual or the campaign that is the beneficiary of the ad.Politics being what it is these days,that's not surprising.When an independent expenditure committee in California ran ads in the 1988 presidential campaign featuring Willie Horton the convicted murderer who raped a Maryland woman while on weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison, the George Bush campaign was immediately suspect.

In a move that could quickly change the tone of Baltimore's primary election, Mayor Sheila Dixon fired back at her leading opponent yesterday with a negative television commercial questioning her adversary's commitment to fighting crime. Dixon's new television advertisement, which criticizes City Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. for voting against a pay raise for police officers in 2001, is a sharp departure from the more genteel, above-the-fray approach her campaign has taken to date.