This is pretty amazing – hat tip to HeartlandDem for finding the story.
Political parties have spent millions of dollars on TV ads and most of them are negative. Even with so many, some stand out from the pack. Jonathan Alter, a Newsweek columnist and a NBC News contributing correspondent, choose a few ads that are especially stupid, humorous, or even downright mean.
In the “downright mean,” also known as “nastiest” category, here are your choices:
Unless something truly shocking happens in the next five days, it’s looking like Kerry Healey won’t have an election victory to celebrate next Tuesday night. Let’s see if we can give her at least one win this election season by heading over to MSNBC and supporting her bid for nastiest attack ad in the United States!
Seems to be the one that dominates the national airwaves. probably because it is a close race. But let’s give Kerry Healey some kind of win. Does she get some sort of trophy or something?
It’s a bronze revolving door with four miniature Willie Hortons spinning around as “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” by AC/DC plays.
Could you supply a visual and an audio for that idea?
I watched the cleft palate ad, and I didn’t think it was nasty at all. Here was a testimony from a constituent, straight up.
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Assuming she was telling the truth, what’s nasty about pointing out that one representative did nothing, whereas the other did something substantial?
They needed a Dem ad for “balance”.
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No one can play in the gutter like the Republicans!
That Kerry Healey’s in a pretty distant third…
I really needed another distraction. Now I have to go watch all the ads here. Bill Richardson’s is cute.
I love all the funny ones. The Montana one is so random. Maybe you have to be there to get it. The dumb ones are pretty dumb, with the exception of the leader, Twilight Zone, which I’d say qualifies more as mean and awful and absolutely disgusting than as dumb. If that guy wins I…I really don’t know.
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As for the meanest ad, I think the reason Deval is losing is that without the context of the Ben Laguer case its merely extraordinarily distasteful and potentially traumatizing. The Playboy one should be winning if the Healey one isn’t; the cleft pallot one is not an attack at all but just a statement of fact. It’s no worse than the Michael J Fox commercials and really quite tame. The vote totals look suspicious to me: 2000 more votes than in the others, so somebody might have been stuffing the ballot box for it. On an the other hand the voting format is confusing, probably people just didn’t realize they had to hit “vote” after each section.