ANALYSIS : Direct, Credible Attack Ads Working Best

In a season when Americans are fed up with politics and the direction of the country, candidates are finding that negative campaigning is working better than ever--as long as it is an honest straight-in-the-face assault.

Amid so much public cynicism, ads with positive messages and ads that are amusing or even attractive are proving ineffective. And the ads working best are those attack messages that have an air of being direct, simply photographed and offering some sense of credible documentation.

Call it the autumn of attack verite.

The reasons are simple, if discouraging. Voters are so distrustful of politics and the government that positive promises of hope and hard work strike them as unconvincing. At the same time, they are so wary of political commercials that anything particularly clever or handsome seems too slick and manipulative.

“Our figures show 65% to 70% of the people feel the country is on the wrong track,” said Neil Newhouse of the Wirthlin Group, former President Ronald Reagan’s pollster. “In this kind of an environment, ‘Morning in America’ doesn’t cut it.”

With limited patience for the political game, voters appear to want ads that make it easy to decide quickly between candidates.

“When you test the really funny, clever, creative stuff, they aren’t any good because people see them as advertising rather than down and dirty information,” said Doc Sweitzer, a Democratic media consultant with nine clients in close races.

It is almost as if voters have become so hardened by politics that negative messages seem more believable. As a result:

--Voters are responding best when candidates show a lot of visual documentation to illustrate claims, particularly newspaper clippings and financial reports, as in the spots of California’s gubernatorial hopefuls Pete Wilson and Dianne Feinstein.

--Photography has gotten simple, even crude, while music, fancy cutting and amusing manipulations of the image are out.

--And in what was once considered a particularly public form of political self-immolation, many candidates are delivering their attacks themselves, staring straight into the camera’s unblinking eye, like Republican Sen. Larry Pressler of South Dakota and Democratic Senate challenger Harry Lonsdale in Oregon.

In some races, increasing scrutiny of political advertising by the press is also encouraging attack ads to be more authoritative and fact-oriented.

Many attacks this year seem less personal than in previous campaigns and more oriented around themes such as the economy, the environment and local problems, while tying all of those to a sense of discontent with politics as usual.

Political professionals are even finding that incumbents need to go on the attack earlier than ever before, or risk allowing their challenger to define them as part of the troubled status quo.

That partly explains why mild mannered Democrat Paul Simon, so quick on the trigger in Illinois this year, is expected to hold his Senate seat. And it helps understand why Republican maverick Mark O. Hatfield, hesitant to attack in Oregon, may well lose.

“It used to be you went positive first, then negative later,” said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. “Now you go negative first, then battle it out back and forth and finish positive.”

The attack must also be tailored specifically to an opponent’s position or record. One reason Republican Sen. Jesse Helms is in trouble in North Carolina, consultants from both parties said, is that he used the same rhetoric to attack Democrat Harvey Gantt he had used on opponents in earlier years, and now it smacked of politics as usual.

And if advertising is increasingly negative, the most effective strategy to combat it might be called a double negative. Once, denial was considered the best response to an attack, but now, many political consultants say, their research suggests the best approach is to attack the attacker for slinging mud. It seems that even though voters respond best to ads they think of as comparative and informational, in theory they still don’t like the idea of attack politics.

The campaign of Democratic Senate hopeful Paul Wellstone in Minnesota might seem to offer one exception to the notion that “clever” commercials don’t work this year. Wellstone, a political science professor turned candidate, has produced some of the most sophisticated spots in years.

His best known was a takeoff on the movie “Roger and Me” called “Where’s Rudy?” that ran for an extraordinary two minutes. In it, Wellstone wanders into the campaign headquarters of rival Rudy Boschwitz, looking for the incumbent Republican senator and clearly putting Boschwitz’s uncomfortable staff on the defensive. The spot, which dramatized Boschwitz’s refusal to debate, implied in look and length that Wellstone was not a typical politician and suggested that Boschwitz was.

In fact, the ad ran only twice in the state, and it was designed largely to attract media attention to Wellstone’s financially starved campaign. It worked like a jump start, and Wellstone may well beat Boschwitz as part of a tide that is running against politics as usual.

But even this spot, while clever, was shot in a plain manner with a hand-held camera, more a home video than the highly stylized roving camera “realism” of recent Madison Avenue campaigns.

To some degree, all the insights of political consultants are part of a self-contained universe. Once polling and focus group tests show a message to be effective with voters in one place, the consultants naturally test the same message elsewhere. That does not mean that only that message would work, only that it has already been refined.

Yet this year--whether for Republicans or Democrats--certain themes are hard to miss.

The most widespread is portraying oneself as outside the system, and unfettered by special interests.

“What I am seeing is not anti-incumbent but anti-politics,” said Ed Goeas, president of Tarrance & Associates, a Republican polling firm. Hence incumbents can survive, but “you have to make sure you come across as not just another politician.”

One way candidates are doing this is by trying longer commercials--a minute, for instance, rather than 30 seconds, a tack tried by Republican gubernatorial candidate George V. Voinovich in Ohio and Republican Tommy G. Thompson in Wisconsin.

In a sense, treating issues with more substance, or at least at greater length, has become a marketing advantage.

Another attempt to create the impression that candidates are different is to have them on screen delivering their attacks personally.

This turns on its head the conventional wisdom of political assault, which held that candidates should have unseen narrators deliver their attacks, while making the visual message look like news footage or perhaps draping it in humor. The closer a candidate got to one of his attacks, the thinking went, the greater the risk he might splatter mud on himself.

After nearly a decade of ever greater rancor, however, culminating in the 1988 presidential election, consultants no longer believe that voters are fooled about who is doing the slinging.

Now, doing the deed oneself adds credibility. “The candidate delivering the attack is more effective than the eerie black-and-white footage you used to expect to use,” Goeas said.

The difference is everywhere, whether it’s Sen. Pressler staring earnestly into the camera (dressed like everybody’s neighbor in a flannel shirt) or Democrat Ted Muenster, answering Pressler back (Pressler’s attack was actually a response to Muenster’s initial assault).

“This is the next logical stage of negative advertising,” said Larry J. Sabato, professor of political science at the University of Virginia. “Candidates want their attacks to be credible because they know voters are hardened to them. It is like one-upmanship in negativism.”

Only four years ago, injecting humor in attack ads was considered a clever way of deflecting the potential backlash from making an attack. Consultants David Doak and Bob Shrum gained credit for helping Alan Cranston hold his Senate seat in California with an amusing spot fashioned in the style of an ad for a Greatest Hits Record Album, which highlighted Republican Ed Zschau’s greatest flip-flops.

This year there are cases where humor has backfired.

One consultant privately described facing a particularly amusing attack ad in the South that initially had him worried. The spot highlighted how his candidate had taken a lot of free trips using state planes and automobiles. In the final seconds, the ad said all this was part of the reason the state had needed a tax increase.

When he tested the advertisement in focus groups, however, the consultant found the ad was ineffective. Audiences saw it as amusing entertainment and either missed or didn’t take seriously the link to a tax increase.

Democratic pollster Maslin said also that portraying oneself as a political outsider has worked best when candidates have linked that message to local issues, particularly economic ones.

In Montana, for instance, Democratic Sen. Max Baucus was a key sponsor of the Clean Air Act, one of the most significant environmental laws passed in years. But in his ad back home on the issue, his media consultant Jim Margolis explained: “Much of the focus of the spot is that it means 1,500 new clean coal jobs in Montana.”

In California, one Democratic consultant said privately, one problem Feinstein has faced is that she assumed her personality and femininity made her an outsider, and she failed to link that to other issues to make it a larger theme. As the battle with Wilson fell into a traditional pattern of attack and counterattack over their respective records, her special status as an outsider was lost in the fray.