This political season especially down and dirty

Friday, Oct. 15, 2004 | 5:04 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION: October 17, 2004

Television viewers can get a steady diet of sex scandals, drunken brawls, corruption and general sleaze. And that's just from the political advertising in this election year.

Some observers are calling this one of the nastiest years in their memory for political down-and-dirty campaigns, pointing to several local races -- especially Clark County Commission races -- as examples of the kind of negative politicking that has become the rule every two years.

That extends from the top of the ballot, with hard-hitting television ads in battleground states such as Nevada targeting President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to local races, with televised debates between senate candidates degenerating into name-calling exercises.

Among the five county commission seats before the voters this year, the race for District C has recently taken a decidedly negative trend with a phone campaign tarring incumbent Commission Chairman Chip Maxfield.

And the contest pitting Democratic Assemblyman David Goldwater against Republican incumbent Commissioner Lynette Boggs McDonald is a standout even by 2004's contentious standards.

"The Goldwater and Boggs McDonald race may be setting a new bar as far as personal nastiness," said Billy Vassiliadis, a political consultant whose company, R&R Partners, has worked for both Democratic and Republican candidates.

Vassiliadis, however, notes that the sentiment could be applied to many races, national and local, past and present.

"Every two years, we say this is the worst ever," he said, noting that in the past many campaigns "have been pretty rough-and-tumble."

This year, though, many campaigns have been mired in attacks.

Boggs McDonald has used Goldwater's 2002 mugshot from a drunken-driving arrest in her ads. She has also used the allegations from three female Republican legislators of sexual harassment, and brought up the Democrat's decade-old legal problems stemming from a bar brawl.

Goldwater has admitted that he is "not perfect," and has fired his own broadsides at the Republican incumbent. Among them, Goldwater notes that Boggs McDonald took money in her unsuccessful 2002 congressional bid from Texas-based strip club owners. When Boggs McDonald was on the Las Vegas City Council, the club's owners had her support for a temporary license, now rescinded, for its controversial Treasures strip club.

Other county commission races have included similar sharp accusations.

North Las Vegas City Councilwoman Shari Buck points out that her Democratic opponent, Tom Collins, was arrested for drunken driving more than a decade ago and has had two other, brushes with the law -- both for fights in the 1980s. She does not mention that Collins was not convicted of the drunken-driving charge.

Collins, on the other hand, accuses Republican Buck of supporting Southern Nevada's only "all-nude bar and strip club" in North Las Vegas. Buck's response is that she had no legal grounds to deny a transfer-of-ownership of the Palomino strip club's license.

While tying candidates to strip clubs is a politically potent shot, this year the charges have particular impact because of the federal indictment of three former and one sitting county commissioner on charges that they took money from another strip-club operator in exchange for favorable votes.

Maxfield's opponent, Jerry Tao, has paid for a telephone campaign that ties the commissioner to a political corruption scandal involving three former county commissioners, one sitting commissioner and a strip club owner. Maxfield has not previously been mentioned in the scandal. The campaign also says Maxfield doesn't support U.S. troops and said because the commissioner didn't have a traffic light installed at an intersection, a young girl died. Maxfield called the charges "an outright lie."

Maxfield has taken his own shots at Tao, who is a Clark County deputy district attorney. He accuses Tao, the Democrat, of taking illegal campaign contributions from family members, and a flier to district voters calls Tao "Devious, Deceptive and Unfit for Public Office."

Maxfield has also asked the District Attorney's office to investigate what he calls "illegal" campaign practices.

Among other races:

Gallagher said he has lived in the state for seven years. He rented a home in the district this year.

Gallagher's campaign says that as the head of Park Place Entertainment, now Caesars Entertainment, he established a foundation with $300,000 of company money to help laid off workers with their bills and the company spent $1.8 million to continue health benefits to laid off workers. Supporters also say that Park Place laid off fewer workers than other Strip properties.

Among the Gallagher campaign's responses is a mailer taking Porter's ads to task and saying that the congressman has a "shameless disregard for the truth" that would "embarrass even his own colleagues in Congress. Want more truth in politics? Don't re-elect the liars."

Both candidates have stood by their statements and are running TV ads attacking the other.

One incumbent who hasn't been either the generator or the target of a negative campaign in recent years is Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, a Republican who lacks a Democratic challenger this year.

While Woodbury says criticism directed at him has been mild compared with recent races, he has seen a number of races affecting others that have been "very negative."

"I think the race in District F," the Goldwater-Boggs McDonald contest, "is pretty strong, but I can remember a lot of races in the past where the negative got pretty hot and heavy," he said.

One example Woodbury cites is the 1994 race between former commissioner Erin Kenny, one of those named in the federal strip club investigation, and then-commissioner Don Schlesinger. Schlesinger had appeared to have an advantage in the polls until an anonymous flier mailed from Southern California to voters in District F suggested that the incumbent was gay.

Woodbury shakes his head over the proliferation of negative attacks.

"It's not something I like to see," he said. "It's very regrettable. But the reason people do it is because it works... You probably can't beat an incumbent unless you go negative, and that's why they do it."

Vassiliadis agrees. Ultimately it is the public response that makes attack ads such a part of the American political landscape.

"The public has set the bar lower," he said.

What the public remembers is often not the response or analysis, but the original attack, which sometimes comes from saturation ads from well-funded campaigns, Vassiliadis said.

"The papers have been pretty responsible, but there's no way you guys could overcome that," he said. "I don't know if the truth has been totally thrown out the window, but it's been so bent and distorted that it's not recognizable any more.

"This is what the public is saying works for them. I don't know at what point the public is going to say no. Until the public says different, this is what it takes to win or lose a campaign."

Mike Slanker, a GOP election consultant who is working for Porter in his race against Gallagher, and whose company is working for Boggs McDonald, said the charges that this election is worse for negative campaigning are old hat.

"This comes around every election cycle," Slanker said. "I think people's memories are short.

"Every race is unique. David (Goldwater) put out some negative mail early and got the ball rolling. ... David took some swings, Lynette responded."

One reason why attack ads are used is because they can be an effective way to describe legitimate differences between candidates, Slanker says.

"The cost of advertising is so high right now, I mean TV costs are skyrocketing, that you don't have a lot of time to make your point," he said. "The days of setting up an ad with another ad are long gone."

Ultimately, the tussles of negatives add up to a trial in which both sides present their version of evidence that is in the public record, Slanker said.

"The electorate has a right to know," he said. "It gets a lot of labels, but I don't consider it an attack to lay out someone's record."

David Damore, a UNLV assistant political science professor, accepts the conventional wisdom that attack ads do not build support for a candidate, but rather discourage support for an opponent.

He says the ads have become more and more of a standard tool in politics.

"The normal way you campaign is you start with a positive message, establish your credibility, then after you've done that there's not much more to do so you go negative," Damore said. "We're just hard-wired to remember the negative stuff more.

"There's always the fear of going too far, but I've never seen where voters have punished a candidate for going overly negative."

County commission, state senate and other races have become "just horrible campaigns."

The danger, he says, is that candidates can use attack ads as a distraction from real issues.

"It's a way that the candidates can shift the agenda away from substantive stuff," he said.

Still, don't expect them to go away.

"The bottom line is that it just works," Damore said. "Every election cycle it seems to get worse and worse, but they use it because it works."

Hal Rothman, a UNLV history professor, sees it too, and all over the board. He calls this year's crop of negative ads the worst since the 1820s.

"What we've been seeing is a general pattern of nastiness over time, and it's not only our local races here but in national, state and local elections," he said. "What appears to be happening is that candidates are finding that the best way to communicate with voters is to slander their opponents. It's a contest to see who can find the worst thing to say about your opponent."

There have been low points in such campaigning before in American history, but the trend is hitting a new low, Rothman says.

"We've descended into a level of incivility in American political discourse that hasn't been common through much of" the recent past.

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