Substitute "effective" for "attack" and I think we'll all see what ads the independant review comission will come up with as being "bad".
Why are they worried? Has a Republican that might win entered the Mass goobernatorial race? I thought it was all Democrats running, once Romney backed out.
Kerry Murphy Healey, the lt gov, is running as the sole GOP candidate. Christy Mihos is running as an independent;
Reilly, Patrick, and Gabrieli as Dems. There's a chance
Healey and Mihos will split the anti-Dem-hack vote and a Dem
will wind up in the corner office again...
>>But in 1982, Dukakis, in a tough fight to regain the governor's office, ran several strongly negative ads against Governor Edward J. King, a Democrat, including one that claimed taxpayers were paying a ``corruption tax" during King's term. Another Dukakis ad, which was quickly pulled, featured a man calling King a ``son-of-a bleep."
Yes. And wasn't the Dukakis-for-prez campaign partially derailed by the Willie Horton ad? There's a "negative ad"
for you (a FACTUAL one!)
from Wikipedia: Horton "is a convicted felon who was the subject of a Massachusetts weekend furlough program that released him while serving a life sentence for murder, without the possibility of parole, providing him the opportunity to commit a rape and armed robbery. A political advertisement during the 1988 U.S. Presidential race was critical of the Democratic nominee and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis for his support of the program...
"There is some disagreement about whether the Republicans first brought up Willie Horton in the campaign, or whether in fact Al Gore did. Some believe that Horton's name first surfaced during the general election. They say that Senator Al Gore raised only the general issue of the furlough program during the 1988 Democratic presidential primary. In June of 1988, after Dukakis had clinched the Democratic Party nomination, Republican candidate George H.W. Bush seized on the Horton case, bringing it up repeatedly in campaign speeches. Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, bragged that "by the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name." Media consultant Roger Ailes was reported to remark "the only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it."
So Dukakis knows well about "attack ads".