...remind me to leave Georgia and Alabama the heck off my list of stops. Seriously, what the Cybertronian frag is up with these ads?!? I'd love to see a post-partisan political environment, but we don't have that right now -- and running against members of your own party (outside of the primary season) and their achievements is just lame. Jim Marshall boasts of voting with Republicans 65% of the time. The flip is up with that?! Bobby Bright, if your constituents are that amped on conservatives, and you want to serve the majority of them, then I guess you should freaking switch parties!
Now, I'm sure someone told them that these kinds of spots would help them to win the elections, but ugh. If I'm a conservative, I don't want the guy who voted with Republicans 65% of the time -- I want the guy who voted with them 100% (or at least 90+%) of the time. I don't want the guy who says he'll support a conservative, I want the guy who is one. And if I'm a liberal, I'm not going to be particularly excited about voting for either of these candidates -- I'd probably prefer to pack my bags and move to California with the happy dancing hippies (and absent phony Southern accents).
Thankfully, I don't live in either of those states, but the advertising here in Maryland has been pretty depressing too. My massive DVD collection means I don't watch much actual television these days (tonight's viewing -- Torture Garden -- was pretty awesome), but when I have had the TV on during the past few days I've been utterly disgusted by the deluge of O'Malley/Ehrlich attack ads. Really, I don't much care that the other guy is a gin-yoo-wahn asshole; I want to know what makes you so great and worthy of my vote. Maybe I'm unique in that respect.
I also don't like how O'Malley's ads explicitly refer to Ehrlich as having been "fired" by the people of Maryland. Yeah, Ehrlich lost the last election to O'Malley, but that's not quite the same as being fired. One generally assumes that an individual who was fired lost his/her job because of poor performance, but one can do a perfectly serviceable job in office (if not an excellent one) and still lose a political election -- all that requires is for a candidate to fail to communicate his/her virtues effectively, or for an opponent to exaggerate/fabricate his/her shortcomings. O'Malley has my vote guaranteed due to my progressive leanings, but I can understand why someone similarly disillusioned and disappointed with these ads would just stay home on election day.
Given the universal crackdown and enmity for anti-gay bullying in the wake of the recent suicides (despite this having been more/less tolerated -- if not accepted -- behavior for as long as I can remember), do you think political advertisements would stop being so fucking dumb if I shot myself in the head and cited that as the reason? Probably not, but one can dream. 🙁