The Message
Are You Positive?
BY MICHAEL ROBERTS
Westword
Members of the freakin' media are supposed to accurately convey what's
going on in the world, but, as usual, they've got it all wrong. Although
commentators and analysts insist that TV commercials associated with
the 2004 election in Colorado are among the meanest, ugliest and most
misleading in recent memory, folks from campaigns on both sides of the
political divide say that's absolutely incorrect. Maybe their opponents'
spots are negative, but not theirs. Perish the thought.
Yep, we're deep in the heart of Spin Season, when reality is a flexible concept
and absurd statements repeatedly delivered with a straight face are treated
like a reasonable facsimile of the truth. In such an environment, it makes
perfect sense that associates of a given candidate decry blistering assaults
made upon their guy, yet identify responses with a similar tone coming from
them as informational opportunities that merely point out discrepancies in
their rival's public stands.
Consider, for instance, an onslaught against Representative Bob Beauprez,
a Republican running for re-election in the 7th Congressional District. The
commercial begins with a stark black-and-white image of combat troops, followed
by an ominous voice making charges against Beauprez that are reinforced by
graphics such as "Bob Beauprez voted to slash GI health-care benefits and veterans'
disability." Finally, an unflattering publicity shot of Beauprez appears just
in time for the word "Failed" to be superimposed over his visage. "Bob Beauprez
has failed," the glum narrator intones. "It's time to vote no to Bob Beauprez."
The ad wasn't sponsored by the national Democratic party, which, like its
Republican counterpart, has bankrolled plenty of offerings here and around
the country that focus on the alleged flaws of opposition candidates rather
than the attributes of individuals in its own camp. Instead, the organization
backing Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas, the Democrat
trying to unseat Beauprez, funded the commercial. Thomas can be heard at its
conclusion delivering the election year's ironic punchline: "I approve this
message."
So is Thomas engaging in negative campaigning? Hardly, says Dayna Hanson,
his communications director. "Dave Thomas has vowed to run a very positive
campaign," she says. "So we have chosen only to highlight Bob Beauprez's record
in Congress and let voters decide if that reflects their values and concerns."
Hanson doubts that anything is beneath Beauprez's
crusaders. When it's noted that no televised ads have surfaced questioning
Thomas's actions in the aftermath of Columbine despite cover-up accusations
recently leveled against him by some critics, she says the topic
turned up in an anti-Dave mailing. As for their commercials, she
declares most of them to be "dirty" and "not rooted in the
truth." To her, this makes what she sees as Thomas's high-minded refusal to
get into the mud with Beauprez all the more remarkable, albeit frustrating
at times. "It's incredibly difficult" not to strike back in kind, she maintains. "I
think anybody would be lying if they said otherwise."
At Beauprez HQ, meanwhile, campaign spokesman Jordan Stoick has
a very different view: Beauprez's philosophy when it comes to commercials "has been
to talk to the voters about his common-sense, mainstream principles and real-world
experience." Beauprez would have stayed exclusively with that approach, Stoick
continues, but "Dave Thomas for months ran a negative campaign against Bob
Beauprez." Hence a shift in strategy, with the Beauprez crew deciding to shine
a light on Thomas. "Dave Thomas's record is obviously fair game," Stoick allows.
An example is a Beauprez-approved commercial in
which Thomas is slapped for having plea-bargained "three out of four criminal felonies" -- a far from atypical
percentage in a major-metro area. Even so, Stoick doesn't view the spot as
negative. "All we're doing is speaking about his record," he says, "and speaking
about someone's record should be part of the process."
Cody Wertz, campaign spokesman for Ken Salazar,
the Democratic aspirant to the U.S. Senate, hits many of the same
notes. He stresses that Salazar "came out early with a positive campaign pledge that was verbally agreed
to. Ken said, ŒLet's keep this about the issues and not get into the
negatives, the slurs and the slime.'" Nevertheless, his campaign was behind
a commercial that said Pete Coors, the Republican who is Salazar's foe
in the Senate contest, wouldn't put Osama bin Laden to death. As it
turns out, Coors is against capital punishment, meaning he wouldn't fry anyone.
Dragging in bin Laden, then, is a colossal distortion on par with declaring
that because Salazar is pro-choice, he might allow a future president of the
United States to be aborted.
Wertz, though, doesn't consider the bin Laden spot
either unfair or underhanded: "In
that ad, we were legitimately pointing out the true differences between Pete
Coors and Ken Salazar." Besides, Wertz feels that Coors's minions took this
path first. According to him, "The Coors campaign and their friends went negative
early on, attacking Ken on his environmental record and homeland security.
But we reserved the right, in an open letter we sent to Mr. Coors, to defend
ourselves when we're attacked, and we've done that."
For her part, Coors campaign spokeswoman Cinamon Watson uses
verbiage much like Wertz's to paint her boss as the victim, not the
aggressor. "It's
in everybody's interest to make sure the race is very clean and focuses on
the issues," she says. "That's why it's unfortunate that Ken Salazar has launched
so many nasty attack ads -- and when you're attacked in that nature, you have
to defend yourself."
Of course, a Coors-approved ad chiding his adversary
for the early release of 71 sex offenders, even though Salazar fought
against doing so in court, seems more like offense than defense --
but not in Watson's mind. The ad isn't negative, and it's entirely
justifiable because, she says, "It's fair to draw
strong contrasts between the two candidates."
Joanna Conti, a Democrat bidding to represent the 6th Congressional
District, attempts to do likewise in a simple but effective commercial that
introduces her to the public even as it takes a shot at the amount of energy
the district's incumbent, Tom Tancredo, pours into immigration reform.
Conti campaign manager Sean Bertram says the look of the ad is key. "We
need people to understand that the campaign has a real shot at removing a single-issue,
myopically focused candidate," he says.
Tancredo's people don't seem overly concerned, probably because their man
is seeking re-election in what's widely considered to be the safest Republican
district in the state. Many major candidates and backers of numerous ballot
issues have turned to nationally recognized out-of-state players like Strother
Duffy Strother, the Washington, D.C., firm that put together Conti's ad, to
give their advertisements a professional sheen. In contrast, the pro-Tancredo
spots are amusingly primitive; one of them features a family photo and the
sort of graphics common to car-dealership commercials of the '80s. Dave
Pearson, Tancredo's campaign manager, says the ads were put together by "local
people" he doesn't name. If they're students in a high school audio-visual
program, they did a fine job. If not, they at least worked cheap. According
to Pearson, "We're fiscally conservative."
Regardless, Pearson went to the expense of consulting
a lawyer after the release of a radio commercial put out by Coloradans
for Plain Talk (CFPT), a private group known as Colorado Families
First until earlier this month; it was being confused with Families
First Colorado, a nonprofit that works with abused children. In the
ad, a woman identified as "Nora Evans" of Greenwood Village is heard
listing numerous controversies that Tancredo has stirred over the years: "You
attacked an honor-roll student for pursuing the dream of a college education
just because his family wasn't born in America," and so on. Pearson says the
ad's content is as bogus as the person making the claims. After some investigation,
he found record of a Nora Evans who lived in Aurora about six years ago (she's
now in Wisconsin), but no one by that name who's ever resided in Greenwood
Village.
CFPT, whose major donors include recent Westword cover-boy Jared
Polis (his office didn't return two calls for comment), has a flair for
dramatic interpretations. The outfit financed two commercials in which an
actress in a pink suit portrayed Representative Marilyn Musgrave,
a Republican pursuing re-election in the 4th Congressional District. In one,
the Musgrave surrogate is seen robbing a corpse in an open casket to illustrate
her opposition to legislation that would have prevented nursing homes from
assessing charges against dead people.
Okay, that's gotta be negative, right? CFPT spokesman Tim Knaus doesn't
use the word, but he comes closer than his peers when describing the ads as "very
provocative and very satirical." He acknowledges that the goal of the commercials
was to undermine support for Musgrave despite the district's heavily Republican
cast; the 4th isn't quite as conservative as the 6th, but close. Still, Knaus
is sure that negativity alone won't be enough to win an upset for Democrat Stan
Matsunaka. "We can bring her down from a 60 percent vote to 50 percent," he
says, "but it's equally important to get his positives up."
Federal election rules forbid CFPT from communicating with Matsunaka's campaign,
and Matsunaka spokesman Ed Graham confirms that there's been no contact
between the outfits. "Some people assume it's a wink-wink arrangement, but
it's really not that way," he says. Graham claims to not even have seen the
pink-suit ads because he's been too busy trying to complete Matsunaka's own
commercials -- and the delay has hurt. In recent weeks, the airwaves have been
full of Matsunaka-bashing, courtesy of the Republican Party and Musgrave's
campaign, whose allegedly humorous spot linking her opponent to a perpetually
screaming Howard Dean is borderline incomprehensible. Musgrave representatives
didn't reply to numerous interview requests.
Amid all the televised sourness, a few campaign commercials actually take
the high road, notably a smooth and sophisticated ad in favor of the FasTracks
rail-expansion measure that features a strangely unbilled Mayor John Hickenlooper.
If current polling is to be believed, the spot appears to be working, and David
Kenney, whose local agency had a big role in putting it together, thinks
he knows why. "This year, there's frankly been a lot of obnoxious election
advertising," he says. "The challenge is to break through, and we thought we
could do that by being smart and subtle, not by being louder and more obnoxious."
Isn't that looking at the situation a bit negatively?
