1994 Ad

National Review, Nov 21, 1994 by Rich Lowry

WATCHING local TV in Raleigh, North Carolina, you learned two things about David Funderburk in recent weeks: He doesn't pay his bills,' and he has attacked the Rev. Billy Graham. The scofflaw with a mean streak is the Republican nominee for Congress in North Carolina's 2nd District. As election day loomed, he felt the brunt of the Democrats' survival strategy: spend and distort.

The unpaid-bills charge refers to a financial tangle from Funderburk's failed 1986 Senate campaign. The Funderburk's Senate organization and the people who actually ran his campaign are still locked in a complicated argument over who owes whom money. But all debts to outside vendors - pollsters, printers, etc. - have been settled. As for the criticisms of Billy Graham, Funderburk made them when he was ambassador to Rumania in the 1980s and worried (justifiably) that Graham's trips to Eastern Europe would make good propaganda for the Communists. Needless to say, the nuances are left out of his opponent's ads.

Which left Funderburk with the uncomfortable choice of responding to the ads at the expense of his issues message (taxes, crime, congressional reform) or letting the charges stand. If you had a million dollars the way he does," Funderburk said of his opponent, Richard Moore, You could both respond to every wild charge and get your message out." Funderburk didn't. Moore had roughly a 100,000 edge in fundraising, according to the latest FEC report, and an ample family fortune sitting behind that.

Well-financed negative campaigns are a decidedly bi-partisan affair, of course (cf. Michael Huffington and Oliver North), but they've had a special significance for Democrats this year. The Democrats' issues are almost non-existent, their President is anathema, and even the bring home the bacon" message of old has lost some of its resonance. "There's no rationale for candidacy,' says Republican National Committee spokesman Chuck Greener. "You don't hear Democrats offerring what they intend to do for the next two years. Or why its so important to have another Democratic vote in Congress.'

When Democrats did choose to run positive, issue-oriented ads this year, they often found themselves awkwardly mimicking Republican positions. Democratic Senator Kent Conrad (N.D.) ran TV spots bragging that he voted with Minority Leader Bob Dole more than with President Bill Clinton. Apart from disloyalty, this had the additional demerit of being untrue; Conrad sided with Clinton on 83 per cent of the votes in the 103rd Congress.

So the Democrats' best weapon was the smear - backed, especially when the Democrat was an incumbent, by big bucks. If Democrats hold on to their congressional majorities this year (this page goes to press a week before the election), it is to this combination that they will owe their survival.

Senator Jim Sasser (D., Tenn.) provides a nice snapshot of the Democratic disarray. At first, Sasser was positive. Early in his campaign he ran a (now famous) ad touting his support for voluntary school prayer. (Never mind that for the 18-year Senate veteran school prayer has ranked as an issue somewhere near foreign aid for Freedonia.) But later, Sasser got personal. A radio ad attacked opponent Bill Frist, a doctor, for medical experiments: "after [Frist] got the cats home, he would take them to his lab and perform experiments on them, experiments that killed the cats.' Finally, Sasser was dishonest. One TV spot flashed across the screen: "Frist's pledge: Cut Medicare by $124 billion."

That charge has a complicated genealogy. It refers to the Senate version of the Contract with America,' which itself says nothing about Medicare cuts. But in the accompanying cost analysis there is tortured language about possible "entitlement reform" that would achieve savings equal to all Clinton proposals to reduce "non-Social Security" entitlements. Since the Clinton health plan envisioned Medicare cuts of $124 billion, Sasser pinned the number on Frist. In other words, he attacked Frist for a Clinton proposal.

The "Contract with America" provided fodder for similar attacks across the country; about forty Democratic campaigns had cut anti-Contract ads by the campaigns final weeks. In Nebraska, three-term congressman Peter Hoagland ran a TV ad against his Republican challenger, Jon Christensen, featuring a Social Security card breaking in half and an elderly woman sitting at a kitchen table, her medication and a cup of coffee in front of her. The script read, in part: "Christensen backs a plan to cut Social Security and Medicare right now. Jon Christensen. He's a radical right extremist. And he's dangerous on Social Security."

Other Democrats were more specific. House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (Mo.) hit his opponent, Gary Gill, for allegedly supporting a $158-a-month cut in Social Security checks. Yet the Contract contains no specific spending cuts. It does have a Balanced Budget Amendment, which would mean a tighter federal budget; spending growth over the next five years would have to be held to 2 per cent instead of 5 per cent. But it does not necessarily entail slashing Social Security checks, let alone by a specific amount. "The Democrats are running the most incredible campaign of distortion in their history," says one Republican House aide. All they can do now is try to scare the sick and elderly."