Are you fed up? Has this year’s gutter-level campaigning driven you up a wall? If so, you’re not alone. Election 2010 may well be the ugliest, most vicious, no-holds-barred election season in modern American history. Distortions, innuendo, guilt by association, character attacks, muckraking from the distant past — all made worse by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which loosed innumerable new special interest groups on the campaign landscape.
Both the Dems and the GOP are guilty of the basest sort of campaigns, with little or no money being spent on positive, informative ads. The voter has to dig through the dirt to find facts, has to search for voting records and biographies with an eye to the possible bias of each source. It’s frustrating for anyone wanting to cast an informed vote.
The attacks have become so reckless, they sometimes miss the target completely. In Colorado, for example, not one but two campaigns have actually attacked the wrong person. So much for allowing out-of-state groups to run ads; they don’t even know who they’re campaigning against.
In such an environment, it’s tempting to vote “No,” to refuse to vote for anyone who runs attack ads or allows others to run such ads for them, and to somehow send a message that this behavior is not acceptable. After all, if the candidates are willing to campaign in the gutter, can we really expect them to do things any differently in Washington?
Normally, I’m not a fan of ads of any kind, but I’ll take the usual attempts to sell me crap I don’t need or want any day over the ludicrous crap in these political ads. I heard once that there’s a place where voters get a “None of the above” option on their ballots. I think it’s high time we had that option too!
I’ll vote for that!
I’m really really sick of it. I’d copy and paste that really in there a few more times, but what’s the point? You know what I’m saying. This is the worst it’s ever been when it comes to negative ads and absolute BS.
And yet I keep hearing they do it because “negative advertising works.” The idea that a lot of people believe that crap and vote accordingly is more disturbing than the ads themselves.