Bush, Kerry ads just warming up

For Inland Northwest voters who are tired of the ongoing campaign battle over war images – grainy black-and-white shots of John Kerry in Vietnam matched against disappearing high-tech weapons from the Bush campaign – there’s bad news ahead.

Record levels of early spending in the presidential race are just the beginning swells of what some media experts believe will be a tsunami of campaign ads this fall. By then, more candidates will be trying to influence a relatively small segment of voters.

“Washington is a perfect storm state, with all of these races swirling around,” said professor Fred Goldstein, director of University of Wisconsin’s Advertising Project, which tracks political television commercials.

Candidates for governor, Congress and other key offices might have a hard time registering with voters by September, the traditional start of the campaign season, he said.

Fueling the storm will be the record amounts of money pouring into the presidential campaign, where the major Democratic candidates and President Bush have already topped the $343 million that was spent in the 2000 race.

And that was before the Kerry campaign started its three-week, $25 million ad blitz to counter the six-week, $70 million onslaught by the Bush campaign.

“The ads right now are arguably trying to set the tone for the race,” said Steven Weiss of the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group that tracks campaign giving and spending.

Both candidates apparently made the decision to advertise in the spring – usually considered the “down time” between the end of the active primary season and the national conventions – when they don’t have to compete with other candidates’ ads, Weiss said.

“They’re using the downtime right now in the hopes of changing people’s minds,” Weiss said.

President Clinton ran a few commercials for his 1996 re-election campaign in the summer of 1995, Goldstein said. But the volume of advertising this year is what’s unprecedented, several experts agreed.

“It is an arms race,” Weiss said. “But political fund raising in general is an arms race, and it has been for quite awhile.”

With Bush and Kerry both breaking records for fund raising, neither presidential campaign has to be as careful with its spending as past candidates, he added.

Like most arms races, the side responsible for upping the ante depends on which side’s being asked.

The Kerry campaign complains that they were forced to launch their ad blitz, with 60-minute commercials featuring the Massachusetts Democrat’s war record and family background, to counter attacks by the incumbent.

“He’s a fighter and he’s not going to take these attacks,” said Laura Capps, a regional spokeswoman for the Kerry campaign.

The Bush campaign seemed to take the initiative, with ads that labeled Kerry a “flip-flopper,” said Bruce Pinkleton of Washington State University, who studies campaign ad techniques and works with Goldstein.

“Kerry was not working to define himself, so the Bush campaign did,” Pinkleton said. “Just recently, Kerry responded with family and people he served with, saying ‘He’s not that flip-flopper.’ ”

Molly Bordonaro, regional director for the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign, argued that they were really responding to a first attack, not by Kerry but by a new type of political group allowed by a recent change in federal campaign laws. The “527 committees,” named for a section of the federal law that authorizes them, can receive and spend almost unlimited amounts for campaigns independent of the candidates and the political parties.

One such committee, Move On, which opposes the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq, began advertising in January.

“They’re new to the mix and they have no limits on contributions,” said Bordonaro.

The Federal Election Commission refused last week to impose any restrictions on such committees. That could prompt another escalation in the presidential campaign arms race, because some Republican donors had refrained from giving to 527 committees until the FEC ruled.

Bush and Kerry also are setting fund-raising records with the Internet, as they work on new wrinkles to a campaign weapon deployed by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in the Democratic primaries.

But not all voters are being bombarded by the same level of presidential ads as Inland Northwest viewers.

Washington is considered a “battleground state” because Bush lost the 2000 presidential election by only about 6 percent of the total vote. The Bush campaign says it thinks it has a chance to win this time, something no Republican has done since Ronald Reagan’s re-election of 1984.

“Washington is going to be competitive,” said Bordonaro.

Capps agreed that Washington is one of about 19 states the Kerry campaign considers up for grabs.

Idaho, where Bush won big in 2000 by topping Democrat Al Gore by more than 40 percentage points, is not on either campaign’s list of competitive states. But North Idaho gets much of its television from Spokane, so Panhandle voters are treated – some might say subjected – to the same early messages.

If the money holds out, those commercials will only increase in the fall in the countdown to the Nov. 2 election. At that point, the big bank accounts for the presidential campaigns could create two problems for all the other campaigns.

They could gobble up most of the time set aside by networks and local television stations for political advertising.

“They’re making it so much tougher for a mere Senate or congressional candidate or initiative to get on the air,” said political consultant Brett Bader of Bellevue-based Madison Communications, who jokes that the new FEC rules on higher campaign contributions should be called “the Broadcasters Full Employment Act.”

They could also leave the public saturated by political rhetoric before the other candidates start advertising.

“The danger is you spend a lot of money and don’t move your opinion polls,” said Bader. “The battle is over that tiny sliver that may be swayed by commercials.”

But in close elections, it’s that tiny sliver that makes the difference between victory and defeat, Bader and other campaign observers said.

Goldstein, of the Ad Project, said there is some evidence of diminishing returns with ads – that is, more commercials are needed to get the same result. At that point, campaigns often switch to negative ads. Voters complain about the so-called attack ads, but they are affected by them, WSU’s Pinkleton said.

Bordonaro doubts that voters will become saturated by ads and tune out the campaigns.

“There are big issues, the economy, the war on terrorism,” she said. “Because of the issues, the American people are tuning in.”

Her counterpart on the Kerry campaign agreed. “I think people are pretty engaged,” said Capps. “The public is looking for more information.”

The point when more information turns into too much information is unknown, said Kirstin Brost of the Washington State Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign, which helps with races up and down the ballot.

“But I think this is going to be the year that figures that out.”