BRING DA' FUNK:

Democrats Trounce Bush in Negative Ads (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Beth Lester, Clothilde Ewing and Sean Sharifi, 3/26/04, CBS News)

The Bush-Cheney campaign has defended its ads attacking John Kerry by saying that Kerry ran 16 negative ads against Bush before Bush-Cheney even got into the game. And a study out today by the Wisconsin Ad Project documents that Democrats have been clobbering President Bush in TV ads for months.

"The Democrats spent $51.3 million in the top 100 media markets during the Democratic presidential primaries … Although only a handful of ads attacked fellow Democrats in the field, half of all the ads aired by the Democratic presidential candidates had at least one negative mention of President Bush and his administration. Of the $10.6 million that now-Democratic nominee Kerry spent on advertising in his bid for his party’s nomination, 78 percent of his ads had at least one criticism of President Bush."

The study also says that "of all of the Democratic presidential primary candidates, Kerry ran the most negative television advertising campaign, with less than a quarter of his spots being purely positive. Kerry’s criticisms were entirely aimed at Bush, while other candidates, most notably Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean, also used spots to directly attack their Democratic primary opponents. Edwards and Clark were the most positive of the Democratic candidates."

The study says that by and large the Bush ads so far have been mainly positive and a Pew Poll released yesterday indicated that Americans may be aware of that fact. Forty-seven percent say that John Kerry has been too critical of George Bush, while only 33 percent feel Bush has been too critical of Kerry.

Which gives Bush and Rove a free hand to "respond".

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 26, 2004 1:38 PM