Dispatch Attacks Republican Slime, Claims It Doesn't Work

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 08:48:53 -0700

The headline of the story is:

Republicans refuse to throw away their repulsive election playbook

And it starts out this way:

In sports, a play that doesn��t work eventually is purged from the playbook.

Not so in politics. Three times in the last 20 years, Republicans have used an unholy Hail Mary pass in desperate attempts to pull out last-minute victories. So far, voters twice have batted down the passes, and now they��re in position to do it again.

Joe Hallett then goes on to give two examples of where the GOP slime didn't work:

Jim Rhodes in 1986 and George Voinovich in 1988

Hallett then says that the GOP hasn't learned from these failures that negative campaigning doesn't work and points to Ken Blackwell's attacks on Ted Strickland.

Joe does touch heavily on the filthly Bill Hayes ads that Russell and I have written about here on BSB:

But the scummiest attack so far, in my opinion, is a TV ad aired by Republican Bill Hayes, who is running against Democrat Dan Dodd in the 91 st Ohio House District, including all of Perry and Hocking counties and parts of Licking and Pickaway counties.

In a district that is 97 percent white, this is the "Willie Horton" ad of 2006, showing a big photo of a black deathrow inmate next to a photo of Dodd. "Dan Dodd does not want this man to be executed," a narrator says. "He kidnapped, raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl. Dodd��s liberal plan would spare his life."

The evidence for this claim, which is not cited in the ad, is a scholarly treatise written in 2003 by Dodd and seven other University of Cincinnati law students showing that 88 of 173 Ohio Death Row inmates would be removed from Death Row if criteria used by a commission in Illinois were applied to Ohio.

Candidates who sling such sludge should not be rewarded.

But the major point I think Joe is missing is the many times it does work for the GOP.

We all know that when Karl Rove got done with John Kerry we all knew he'd been in black pajamas fighting with the North Vietnamese (and don't bother trying to tell me it didn't come out of Rove's office).

We all know that Al Gore was slandered and libeled during the 2000 campaign.

Joe should reflect on how many Americans are dead simply because of those two very successful attacks and we all know it successfully happens all over the country.

In my own little state house district in 2002, Lori Tyack, currently Franklin County Municipal Clerk of Courts was savaged by the now retiring Linda Reidelbach for being "Tax Hike Tyack" because she speculated about an income tax increase in one of those Vote Smart surveys (something the current candidate hasn't learned from).

The problem is that the media is complicit in these attacks. They seem to feel that both sides in an argument deserve equal coverage. Call it the "Crossfire Effect" where it was literally OK to put someone in a Klan outfit on the same stage as someone who was a civil rights worker.

Of of this mentality was born Fox News. People like Brent Bozell dog the media looking for "liberal bias" and hound the media into "equal coverage" at a minimum.

The real question about the whole Dan Dodd / Bill Hayes issue isn't why Bill Hayes and the Ohio House Republican Caucus PUT the ad on the air ... we know whey they did.

The real question that Joe Hallett needs to explore is why the TV stations LET IT on the air.

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Dispatch Attacks Republican Slime, Claims It Doesn't Work