Bill Cotterell: Campaign sleaze season again | Opinion

In Richard Nixon’s race for the U.S. Senate in 1950, campaign manager Murray Chotiner said something that echoes all these years later: “The purpose of an election is not to defeat your opponent, but to destroy him.”

Running against fellow House member Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon issued a “pink sheet” saying she’d voted 456 times the same as New York Rep. Vito Marcantonio, who was sort of the Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of the day. Of course, Nixon didn’t mention that he, too, had voted hundreds of times with the East Harlem radical — mostly on stuff like approving yesterday’s congressional record, marking the passing of a college president somewhere in Iowa or commending a Texas football team on a good season.

On the big stuff, Douglas had parted ways with Marcantonio. But Nixon’s smear tactics worked, so vicious and misleading attack ads flourish to this day.

A choice example just popped up in the Florida State Senate race between Sen. Loranne Ausley, D-Tallahassee, and Republican Corey Simon, the former FSU football player and NFL veteran. The Democratic legislative campaign committee sent out a mail piece that basically says Simon doesn’t want to protect children from school shootings. Worse, it depicts him in a target-like wooden frame, with bullets scattered on the floor and a rifle lying nearby.

“Don’t let extremists like Corey Simon turn our schools into shooting ranges,” is the message.

The point is to underscore the standard Democrat-Republican divergence on gun control. Ausley generally supports restrictions, Simon adheres to the GOP’s Second Amendment absolutism. 

But it’s the technique, not the message, that is far out of bounds — and all too common — in this thing.

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Black people as targets is a racist trope that even offended the calloused sensibilities of the Republican Party of Florida, which quickly pointed out the Democrats’ imagery. Hyper-sensitive Democrats can usually read racism into stop signs and cloud formations, but they missed this one big time. 

They countered that the mailer is legal and complies with what Florida whimsically calls campaign laws.

Officially, the mailing is a “three-pack” ad. It’s all about attacking Simon, on behalf of Ausley. But there’s a squib saying to vote for her and two other women running for the Senate elsewhere, which makes it a “party-building” piece, not an Ausley ad.

Nonetheless, it’s beneath any concept of fair campaigning. Ausley said the piece was put out by the state party organization, not her campaign, so she had no control over its content.

Not good enough. If you benefit from a hit piece, you ought to own it or denounce it. 

If she really doesn’t approve, Ausley could issue a statement like, “I want to win, but not like this. I disagree with Mr. Simon on many things, including guns, but I don’t want to tell voters he’s dangerous for our children.”

Unless she does want to. Would you let people go around saying nasty things about your competitor, and wash your hands of it?

Wretched excess in campaign ads is nothing new for Florida.

Years ago, there was a bill to ban the so-called “date-rape drug,” a powerful anesthetic. A House member who was a physician amended it so doctors could continue using the drug in emergency rooms, while keeping it away from predators in bars. The amended bill then passed.

Next election season, opponents put out a leaflet calling him “Doctor Date Rape” and claiming he had voted let guys in bars drug women’s drinks.

When legislators rushed to tighten rules for judges considering pre-trial release of sex offenders, a House member voted with everyone else for the bill that passed. Then they routinely tabled three or four similar bills that were no longer relevant — a common practice. In his next campaign, opponents did an ad with two mothers on a playground, saying he’d voted repeatedly to kill bills protecting children, conveniently not mentioning he’d voted for the law that passed.

Our mailboxes, TV screens and social media will be filled with political messages in the coming month, much of it sleaze. Voters should apply a simple test: Don’t rely on anything Candidate A wants you to believe about Candidate B.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com