Campaign Ads About Abortion Proliferate
Wall Street Journal ¦ 17 September 2008 Economic news has dominated the debate between presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain this week, but independent groups on both sides are betting that key segments of the electorate will base their decision on abortion. A string of provocative advertising campaigns have made their debut, paid for by outside groups and focused on both candidates' views on abortion. The targets: undecided women and devout Catholics in key battleground states. New ads from abortion-rights groups hope to sway undecided voters Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who opposes abortion in most cases including rape and incest, has motivated pro-abortion-rights groups to launch their ads. "Her entry into the race has really shot up the stakes in a big way," says Kelli Conlin, president of the Winning Message Action Fund, the issue-advocacy arm of the National Institute for Reproductive Health founded in February 2008. The group launched an Internet campaign hitting Sen. McCain on abortion in August, and it plans to launch television ads in Ohio, Pennsylvania and other battleground states next month that criticize the Arizona senator and Gov. Palin on their opposition to abortion. The multimillion-dollar "How Much Time?" initiative, targeted at Republican and independent women aged 30 to 60 in key swing states, implies that if abortion is banned, women will be treated like criminals. The ads show images of prison bars closing on a young woman. "When it comes to your personal freedoms, John McCain is worse than George W. Bush. Who's worse than John McCain? Sarah Palin," reads one of the new ads. "The suggestion that John McCain and Sarah Palin want to put women behind bars is absurd," McCain-Palin spokesman Tucker Bounds says in response to the ad. On Friday, Catholics United plans to unveil a new ad in heavily Catholic areas of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania that urges Sen. McCain to adopt a "broad pro-life agenda" that stretches beyond the abortion issue to include support for more-accessible health care and ending the war in Iraq.
More on Campaign 2008
Review the ads released so far this season by both campaigns, as well as those from outside groups. <http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-CAMPAIGNADS08.html> "John McCain, it's not enough to say you're pro-life," the ad says. "You voted for a war that has killed thousands of Americans." Antiabortion group BornAliveTruth.org began airing an ad in New Mexico and Ohio on Tuesday featuring Gianna Jessen, a 31-year-old who survived a failed abortion. "If Barack Obama had his way, I wouldn't be here," Ms. Jessen says. The Obama campaign rejects the premise of the BornAliveTruth.org ad, pointing out that Sen. Obama has said that had he been a U.S. senator at the time, he would have voted for the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. The federal law, enacted in 2002, requires a fetus that survives a botched abortion to be considered a person. Sen. Obama opposed a similar law while in the Illinois state senate partly because he said the state already had a law on the books that would have required doctors to provide medical care in circumstances of failed abortions. Sens. Obama and McCain have denounced advertisements by outside groups. But as the presidential race heats up, independent groups are upping their efforts to help promote their causes and their candidates. Still, as of September, outside groups have spent roughly one-tenth of the $75 million they spent in the same period in the 2004 election cycle, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which monitors political advertising. The ads that have emerged focus largely on specific issues such as abortion. Last week, Vermont-based political action committee Democracy for America and Brave New PAC launched the first of a series of nationwide ads that question Sen. McCain's temperament and asserts that being a former prisoner of war "is not a good prerequisite for a president of the U.S." McCain-Palin spokesman Michael Goldfarb has called the ads a "Swift Boat-style" attack, a reference to a controversial 2004 campaign that questioned Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry's military record. "It's unfortunate that Sen. Obama has fallen so far, from opposing outside expenditures and supporting public financing at the beginning of this race to opting out of public financing and now 'looking the other way' on independent expenditures -- no matter how vile," Mr. Goldfarb says. The Obama campaign maintains that Sen. Obama is against these groups and has come down on Sen. McCain for not discouraging his supporters from donating to some of the same conservative groups that helped create the Swift Boat campaign in 2004. "Barack Obama has consistently said that these outside groups don't belong in our politics. John McCain doesn't share that view," says Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro. Senior Obama adviser Robert Gibbs said in an interview with MSNBC on Monday that the campaign has been "forceful" that "we don't want people to participate in 527s" and "instead participate in our campaign." But some Democrats worried about the increasingly negative tone of the presidential contest say outside groups can fill an important void in getting controversial issues out without putting the Obama campaign on the attack. "I think there's a feeling that one has got to call in all the cavalry," says Democratic strategist Mark Mellman.
| 
