For his latest Karl Rove-ian personal attack ad, Joe Lieberman has retrieved an 18 year-old cartoon bear. This bear is no Yogi.
Lieberman’s new ad attacking his challenger in an Aug. 8 Democratic primary for his U.S. Senate seat, Ned Lamont, has shown up on his campaign web site. Click here to view the commercial (as long as it remains there; the last personal attack ad never made it onto the site).
The commercial evokes one that helped Lieberman first win his seat in 1988. That 1988 ad depicted the then-incumbent, Lowell Weicker, as a fat lazy bear who never showed up for votes in his third term in office. The ad was significant for two reasons: It inaugurated a new era in Connecticut of low-grade personal TV attack ads that belittle opponents, make fun of their appearance or magnify minor or out-of-context portions of their record. And, once he too was firmly ensconced in his third term in the Senate, Lieberman himself repeated Weicker’s absentee record. Lieberman spent much of 2003 running for president — and away from his job as senator. He skipped 54 percent of all Senate votes that year. He was absent for every vote on 63 of the 115 days in which the Senate cast votes. According to one estimate, that meant the taxpayers overpaid Lieberman $38,828.79 in salary that year.
The new cartoon ad reprises the figure of the Weicker cartoon bear. And it adds a new one: a little “bear cub,” aka Ned Lamont.
The same DC consultant hit man, Carter Askew, designed both ads. The new one shows Weicker coming out of his cave, still angry 18 years later that Joe Lieberman beat him. But he’s too lazy to run again. “Instead of coming out of hibernation,” the narrator informs us, “he sent his bear cub instead.” (In fact, Weicker had nothing to do with Lamont choosing to run for Senate.) It portrays Lamont as a whining, hop-about baby who doesn’t want to run against Lieberman because he previously gave Lieberman a campaign contribution. “But I agree with the Republicans 80 percent of the time!” cartoon Lamont protests in a shrill toddler’s voice. But as a “cub” he has to listen to the big bear.
The new ad brings another modern Beltway campaign attack mode to Connecticut: Bush adviser Karl Rove’s strategy of taking your own weakness and turning it into your opponent’s weakness instead, through relentless misrepresentation of facts.
Rove’s strategy first appeared in the 2004 presidential election. Democrat John Kerry was a war hero. George Bush was a National Guard dodger. Through a front group, the Bush team, fueled by corporate campaign contributions, unleased a torrent of commercials and other attacks portraying Kerry as the war shirker, through a disinformation campaign about the “Swift Boat” episode.
In this case, Lieberman, who has raised more than twice Lamont’s money because of his ties to corporate special interests, has used a similar strategy in addressing his chief weakness in a Democratic primary: that he sides with right-wing Republicans on the issues most important to Connecticut Democrats these days, such as the Iraq war, civil liberties, the right to dissent, appointees like Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, gay marriage, and the Bush-Cheney energy bill. On all those issues, as well as universal health care and tax policy toward the wealthy, Lamont is squarely in the camp of the Democratic opposition.
So the Lieberman team has pursued a strategy of relentlessly labeling Lamont the Republican. Why? Because 12 years ago, as a Greenwich selectman, he and other Democrats voted alongside Republicans on some non-ideological town issues. The Lieberman has further portrayed Lamont as anti-schoolchildren and anti-health care. The basis for that: He voted for a final budget that cut a requested health department budget increase from 12 to 6 percent. He voted against a $35 million school renovation project that included an asbestos clean-up because he wanted an independent audit. And he joined a unanimous vote to require top-level school administrators to pay the same increase in health care expenses as unionized town employees.
Lieberman himself called for an end to such old-record-twisting character-assassination ads in his book In Praise of Public Life. He wrote that in 2000, when he didn’t have a serious challenger to his Senate seat.
For the back-and-forth between the Lamont and Lieberman campaign team on the ethics and accuracy of the new ad, click here to read Mark Pazniokis’s account in the Courant.
Whether Lieberman’s ads succeed will signal how much politics is changing — whether corporate-financed, Beltway-style puerile attack ads, the kind Lieberman himself criticized in a 2000 book, can still silence debate and pound out of contention challengers to incumbents.
About Lieberman’s ads, the Manchester Journal-Inquirer (a conservative newspaper more aligned with Lieberman’s than Lamont’s views) recently editorialized: “The whole point of being Joe Lieberman used to be decency, dignity, and thoughtfulness. Lieberman’s attack ads look like the appeals of just another sleazy, desperate pol, grasping madly to hold on to office.”
I hope Joe runs that ad. It's so shameless and ridiculous it's funny.
It also displays a total lack of respect for the voters of Connecticut. But of course, he's shown nothing but disdain for the voters of Connecticut for going on 18 years now.