Campaign ads feed on ignorance

I hope you're as disgusted as I am with all the misleading, not-even-half-truth political ads to which we've been subjected over the past month or so.

A typical bit of punditry you'll hear on television will involve the host bemoaning all the negative campaign advertisements.

Then, the network's resident politics sage will say that while people insist they hate negative ads, they nonetheless work.

"If they didn't," the sage will intone as if revealing a brilliant epiphany, "then we wouldn't be seeing so many of them."

Do you wanna know a genuine brilliant epiphany? Here's your brilliant epiphany: The reason those dastardly ads work is because so many voters are so blasted ignorant.

I like to envision the characters who think up all those horrendous ads as evil gnomes sitting in front of glowing computers in their moist, dank, dark offices.

No sunlight is allowed into their lairs, lest they be burned in the hellfire they so richly deserve.

They are both Republican and Democrat. The only difference between the two is that the Republicans have made hitting below the belt into an art form that the Democrats can only envy.

The local race in the 24th Congressional District between Democrat Michael Arcuri and Republican Ray Meier is a wonderful example.

Well, actually, there's nothing wonderful about it.

The other day, at home, I received a slick 8 1/2-by-11 piece of mail from the National Republican Congressional Committee.

In the background was a shadow image of a stripper cavorting around a pole. Then there is a fuzzy photo of a smiling Michael Arcuri next to some creepy typeface that reveals the following:

"Michael Arcuri billed taxpayers for calls to a sex line and a strip club."

It goes on:

"Michael Arcuri billed taxpayers for a call to a phone sex line with content roo racy to print."

It continues in a similar vein, giving the impression that Arcuri, the Oneida County district attorney, is spending most of his time making sweaty phone-sex calls and charging them to the taxpayers.

That's what those evil gnomes want you to think, and if you didn't know the real story, you would never consider voting for such a pervert.

But here's the real story:

Official records show that there was only one call to the 800-number, and that one call lasted only a few seconds.

What's more, that phone number has the same last seven digits as the phone number for the state Department of Criminal Justice Services.

Arcuri says someone on his district attorney's office staff must have made the mistaken call and hung up immediately upon realizing it was not the intended number.

The bill to taxpayers was for $1.25.

Yup, a buck and a quarter.

The evil gnomes, of course, knew this to be an innocent case of a misdialed phone number ... but they counted on us not knowing.

They spent a whole lot of money creating and mailing that slick piece of garbage, arrogantly and callously gambling on our being ignorant.

The National Democratic Campaign Committee has produced similar _ if not quite so personally egregious _ commercials and mailings warping Meier's record as a state senator.

The two candidates, who profess to be friends and have participated in _ at last count _ 18 quite-civil public debates, say they had nothing to do with the noxious ads.

Under a 2002 campaign-finance law, candidates can have no coordination with "independent" political action committees.

So, the candidates insist, they can't demand that the national committees' scurrilous ads be taken off the air or not mailed to voters.

"It's good cop, bad cop," Evan Tracey, chief operating officer of a company that tracks political advertising, told the Associated Press. "The parties can throw the sharp elbows and give the candidates plausible deniability."

The AP reports that as of last week, the Democrats and Republicans have inflicted almost $160 million worth of negative advertising about the congressional races upon the American public.

And only $17 million on positive ads.

Back to our original question.

The evil gnomes know that we're ignorant. But we have a wonderful chance to show them that we are not apathetic.

A recent poll in Newsweek magazine found that only 9 percent of those who had seen Republican advertisements said the ads influenced them to vote for the GOP.

Meanwhile, 24 percent said those negative ads made them less likely to vote for Republicans.

Newsweek also found that Democratic ads turned off about as many voters as they persuaded to vote for their candidates.

Findings such as those are the only things that may someday vanquish the evil gnomes.

Folks, it's up to all of us to read, educate ourselves and thus remove the ignorance and apathy that feed this hatchet-job perversion of our democracy.

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Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.