Labor Day weekend marks the kickoff of the fall TV season -- not sitcoms and reality shows, but campaign ads.
To help make sense of the impending avalanche of ads, here's The Message Machine Fall TV Preview, part of the NPR/PolitiFact partnership to fact-check the 2010 campaign:
-- My opponent is a lobbyist! We heard this a lot in the primary campaigns and we'll hear it again for the general election. With voters so unhappy with Washington, candidates who can be linked to the political establishment -- particularly if they were Gucci-wearing lobbyists for the SPECIAL INTERESTS -- are easy targets.
Case in point: J.D. Hayworth, an Arizona Republican who served as a lobbyist before he ran unsuccessfully against Sen. John McCain in their state's Aug. 24 primary. A McCain ad mocked him for claiming to be an outsider by showing images of private jets and limos and said his lobbying work was "as inside Washington as it gets." We rated McCain's claim True, but we found other candidates who exaggerated the definition of lobbyist.
-- Insiders acting like outsiders. Insiders are going to great lengths to pretend to be outsiders. Members of Congress have always portrayed themselves as being independent of the Washington power structure, but it's especially true this year because Congress' approval ratings have been hovering near historic lows.
Blanche Lincoln, a Democratic senator from Arkansas, has an ad that likens Washington to children fighting in a preschool class. She says, "I don’t answer to my party. I answer to Arkansas." It's important to look beyond the rhetoric, though: Lincoln last year voted with her party 83 percent of the time.
-- My opponent wants to privatize Social Security! This was a winning line for Democrats in 2005, when they defeated President George W. Bush's proposal to create personal investment accounts, and you will hear it from many Democratic candidates this fall. We've heard the line in Senate races in Colorado, Arkansas and many other states.
Democrats contend that any Republican who backed the Bush proposal or supports Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's budgetary plan, which includes optional personal accounts, therefore wants to "privatize Social Security." We've found Democrats are exaggerating and have rated these claims Barely True or Half True.
-- Where are the jobs? This has been a favorite theme for Republicans, who repeatedly cite high unemployment numbers (like August's just-reported 9.6 percent rate) and claim the Democratic stimulus plan has done little to create jobs. We've heard this in the Nevada Senate race and you'll most likely hear it in many other states. You’ll also hear a variation that Democrats "promised" unemployment would not exceed 8 percent if the stimulus passed. That's a claim PolitiFact has rated Barely True.
-- My opponent is the candidate of Big Oil (or BP)! The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico has been capped, but images of oil gushing into the water are still fresh in voters' minds, so you can expect candidates to try to link their opponents to Big Oil and BP anytime they can.
But watch for exaggerations. We found that Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican running for Senate, stretched the truth when he claimed in an ad that his opponent’s top aide was "a longtime BP lobbyist." The aide had actually worked to help with real estate deals for BP gas stations.
-- Bad bankers. With bankers now as unpopular as lobbyists (and members of Congress!), we've already seen several ads that criticize candidates for their banking ties. An Illinois Senate ad for Kirk criticized Democratic candidate Alexi Giannoulias for making loans to alleged mobsters ... "and then the bank collapsed." This ad, like so many attack ads, glosses over the facts and exaggerates Giannoulias' role. PolitiFact rated it Half True.
-- Stimulus silliness. Republicans have tried to portray last year's economic stimulus package as wasteful and ineffective. So watch for lots of claims about frivolous projects included in the bill. You'll also hear claims from the flip side -- that incumbents did not get enough stimulus money for their states.
-- Oldies but goodies. Some political attacks never go out of style, so expect to hear lines from past campaigns. Democrats will paint Republicans as puppets of the special interests, and Republicans will claim Democrats want to raise taxes.
And one more thing: It's a certainty that both sides will complain that the other side is running too many negative ads.
Bill Adair is editor of PolitiFact and Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times. NPR and PolitiFact are teaming up this year on The Message Machine, an effort to fact-check the political ads that are airing across the nation. Bill's due on Tuesday's Morning Edition to talk about the fall "season."
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