Posted on 05/10/2003 7:36:23 AM PDT by Theodore R.
Chandler resumes attack ads on TV SETS ASIDE CALL FOR END TO MUDSLINGING
By John Cheves HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER
Ending his plan to avoid mudslinging, gubernatorial candidate Ben Chandler launched his sharpest attack yet on rival Bruce Lunsford.
The television commercial, which made its debut Thursday, focuses on elderly patients evicted from Lunsford's nursing homes.
The commercial highlights critical quotes from newspapers about Vencor, Lunsford's former company. It also shows an elderly woman holding her forehead, appearing pained, and black-and-white footage of Lunsford sitting at a desk, looking pleased. The spot is accompanied by eerie music similar to a funeral dirge.
"As CEO of a nursing home company, Lunsford evicted sick, elderly patients to fill the beds with others who had high-paying insurance," a female narrator says. "Evicted seniors were herded like cattle. Sick. Crying."
"Bruce Lunsford. Wrong to hurt seniors. Wrong for us," a male narrator says.
The Lunsford campaign yesterday called the commercial Chandler's "desperate attempt to say anything to win an election." When Lunsford learned about Vencor's patient evictions in 1998, through newspaper accounts, he ordered a stop to them and publicly apologized, campaign aides said.
Campaign attacks probably will get nastier as the May 20 gubernatorial primaries approach, said University of Kentucky political scientist Don Gross.
"Everybody says they don't like attack ads, but candidates wouldn't use them if they didn't work," Gross said. "Candidates use attack ads to change the momentum in a race. In this case, when Lunsford runs attack ads, it seems to indicate his own campaign is stalled behind Chandler's."
Chandler's latest and most scathing advertisement runs contrary to his April 25 call for an end to attacks in the Demo-cratic primary for governor. By contrast, Republican candidates have avoided mentioning one another in their commercials.
The truce failed because Lunsford refused to end his attacks, Chandler spokeswoman Barbara Hadley Smith said yesterday. Lunsford has continued to run several ads questioning Chandler's integrity.
"We had hoped to run a positive campaign, and for two weeks, we did," Smith said. "But because of Bruce Lunsford's ongoing distortions of Ben Chandler's record -- really, it's just character assassination -- we had no choice but to respond."
The Lunsford and Chandler campaigns concede that negative advertising is a calculated risk. "Going negative" can damage a candidate nearly as much as the opponent, they said.
This political truth is clear to the third-leading Democratic candidate, Jody Richards, who begins his latest commercial: "I'm Jody Richards, and my opponents for governor have been running negative ads for nearly two months. I think we should focus on what matters -- improving education and attracting high-paying jobs."
However, it's difficult to stop throwing punches once a brawl begins, the Lunsford and Chandler campaigns said.
Smith of the Chandler campaign said: "Every place we go, we hear 'We don't like the negative ads. They really turn us off.' But at the same time, they say, 'You really need to respond to that latest attack. You can't just sit there while missiles are being lobbed at you.'"
Lunsford campaign manager Scott Anderson agreed that "there's always a risk to us."
"But we fear the risk is greater that people don't learn the truth about Ben Chandler," he said.
In its most recent ads, the Lunsford campaign uses "former federal prosecutor Barbara Edelman" and "Grady Stumbo, M.D." to appear on screen and criticize Chandler.
The ads do not disclose that Edelman is Lunsford's running mate and Stumbo is Lunsford's campaign chairman.
But that is not an effort to distance the campaign from the faces featured in the ads, Anderson said. The ads simply highlight Edelman and Stumbo's more relevant roles in law and medicine, he said.
The Chandler and Lunsford campaigns describe their own attacks as accurate, fair and legitimate criticism, but they complain their rival's attacks are mudslinging without merit.
Actually, the latest rounds of attacks between Lunsford and Chandler are essentially accurate, although some points are obscured or exaggerated.
For instance, in Lunsford's ads, Edelman and Stumbo criticize Chandler, the attorney general, for taking money and other forms of support from various "special interests" and people under indictment on election fraud charges, which he has. But the contributors were charged after they gave; the ads don't make that clear.
In Chandler's new ad, a male narrator begins by saying, "Bruce Lunsford. Guilty. Of negative attacks on Ben Chandler to fool Kentucky voters."
The word "guilty" appears on screen in quotation marks for several seconds, possibly implying that Lunsford was convicted of a crime in relation to Vencor. He was not. Vencor ultimately paid $104 million to the U.S. Justice Department to settle civil claims of billing fraud and poor patient care. But Vencor did not admit wrongdoing, and Lunsford already had left the company.
Smith, of the Chandler campaign, said "guilty" is part of a quote from a newspaper article that called Lunsford "guilty of gross, purposeful exaggeration" in his campaign, not a reference to Vencor's legal trouble.
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