Friday, October 29, 1999
Challengers' ads bash council incumbents
Incumbents' ads highlight themselves
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Money-mad politicians wallowing in piles of cash. Pudgy wrestlers body-slamming each other into the can vas. Bright-eyed children working hard at school. These are just some of the images Cincinnati voters will have in their heads as they go off to the polls Tuesday, images planted by a steady diet of 30-second campaign commercials for Cincinnati City Council can didates.
Campaigns crank out the commercials because everything the political experts have learned about politics says that voters make up their minds based on the images and impressions the campaign commercials deliver.
“New candidates get name recognition and identification with issues; the can didates voters already know get to reinforce their messages,” said Gene Beaupre, a political scientist at Xavier University. “The TV ads set the tone for the campaign.”
This year, there are two themes that come up repeatedly in the council advertising: education, a subject over which City Council has little control, and old-fashioned council-bashing by the non- incumbents.
The challengers have been running against the record of the present council, which, the non-incumbents say, has been wasting tax dollars and has lacked direction.
One of the most biting of the anti-council ads has been a 30-second spot that started Monday for Republican challenger Pat DeWine, the son of U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine.
The ad shows a group of deliriously happy politicians riding a merry-go-round, grabbing handfuls of “your tax money” out of a barrel and tossing it around willy-nilly.
Council, the narrator says, wastes tax dollars on “an executive health club,” a
“beauty school,” and “staff members' salaries.”
The ad refers to money council appropriated earlier this year to fund a health club for overweight children and money that was to go to buy a beauty school — money that was later rescinded.
Judith Trent, a professor of political communications at the University of Cincinnati, called the DeWine ad “very effective,” if somewhat misleading.
“If you watch it, you get the impression council voted to give themselves a health club and beauty school,” Ms. Trent said.
Democrat Charlie Luken, too, takes on the present council in a 30-second spot that begins with grainy black-and-white footage of two wrestlers in the ring.
Mr. Luken comes on, looking at the camera, complains that while city streets are “crumbling beneath our feet,” council seems to be able to “have all kinds of money to spend on goofy stuff, like a school for chubby kids.”
Ms. Trent said she thinks the Luken commercials “works well, but only because it is Charlie Luken. It wouldn't work for anybody else.”
Mr. Luken, a former mayor who has spent the last six years as a TV news anchor, “is known to people; he's already taken seriously,” Ms. Trent said. “If anybody else did this, it would just come across as buffoonery.”
A third and more subtle attempt at council bashing is a commercial for Republican challenger Diane Goldsmith. It is unusual in that it is silent for 22 of its 30 seconds.
A shot of Ms. Goldsmith sitting in a chair and reading a book titled Cities is all the viewer sees, as a text runs down the side of the screen: “Unlike some on City Council, Diane Goldsmith can go for more than 30 seconds without raising our taxes, without wasting our money and without saying something really stupid.”
Ms. Trent called the Goldsmith ad “wasted air time and wasted money.”
The ad fails, Ms. Trent said, principally because the candidate says nothing. If a viewer at home were not looking at the screen, there would be nothing to attract his or her attention, Ms. Trent said.
Some of the less well-known candidates have come up with striking ads aimed at grabbing viewers' attention, like the 10-second spot for Democrat Forrest Buckley, in which the candidate, in what sounds like a growl, says “warm and fuzzy is for sweaters. It's time for council to cut the bull and get down to work.”
Democratic challenger Alicia Reece has a 30-second commercial in which she is seen only in the last few seconds.
Most of the ad is shot in old-fashioned black-and-white film noir style, with a “cop” grilling a woman about what she wants in a council candidate: “Pretty pictures? Promises? The same old faces?” No, the woman says, she wants “businesswoman Alicia Reece ... she will be a voice for the future of our children.”
Ms. Trent said the Reece ad had too much “hokey” drama and not enough of the candidate.
“Instead of introducing us to a candidate most of us don't know, we get to look at two people we don't like very much,” Ms. Trent said. “I don't get this one.”
The incumbents, for the most part, talk about themselves.
One of Republican Charlie Winburn's ads features the candidate making the case that he is “a leader” who has “demonstrated the ability to bring people together.”
To Ms. Trent, it looked like the ad of someone who was trying to be the top vote-getter and, thus, the mayor for the next two years.
On two of Republican councilman Phil Heimlich's ads, the candidate's face and voice are not seen nor heard.
In one, an Evanston barber talks about how the neighborhood has become safer since Mr. Heimlich had a surveillance camera installed at a crime-ridden intersection.
In another, images of school children are mixed with a voice-over about Mr. Heimlich's role in raising scholarship money for inner-city kids and starting a charter school — although the term “charter school” is not used.
Ms. Trent said the Heimlich education ad is a theme “left over from last year's elections,” when national polls told congressional candidates that education was the No. 1 concern of most Americans.
“He doesn't need the name recognition and this doesn't even say he is on council,” Ms. Trent said. “You could mistake this for a school board ad.”
Democratic incumbent Todd Portune's 30-second spot uses an education theme as well. But Ms. Trent said that, unlike the Heimlich ad, it ties in directly to Mr. Portune's City Council job.
In the Portune ad, the candidate talks about his concern for children's safety when they walk to school and when they get there. An announcer says that Mr. Portune was responsible for a “Safe Pathways” program to protect school children and says Mr. Portune “fought to save drug education programs.”
“He's picking up on a popular issue and tying it directly to what he does for a living,” Ms. Trent said.
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