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It Wasn't Pretty, But Negative Ad Sure Worked

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By DANIEL RUTH

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 18, 2008

By now most of us have become so inured to the jibber-jabber of campaign advertising that if we turned on the television and heard a commercial accusing a candidate of being a lying, conniving, race-baiting, drug-dealing, sex-crazed Satanist, most of us would probably idly shrug and say: "That's nice. Would you pass the salt, Bertha?"

We've pretty much come to accept the fact that, regardless of party affiliation, most political advertising is an amalgam of prevarication, distortions, character assassination and innuendo, occasionally sprinkled with the truth. What fun!

Alas, former (accent on "former") Democratic congressional candidate John Dicks didn't have much fun during his recent primary campaign against Republican incumbent Rep. Gus Bilirakis.

And as a result, Dicks has filed a lawsuit accusing the primary's eventual winner, Bill Mitchell, of running a libelous campaign that exposed the former Plant City mayor to "scorn and ridicule."

Stop Hitting Me!

Uh, wasn't this a political campaign, after all? Aren't scorn and ridicule the mother's milk of the hustings? What's next? Warrick Dunn filing a lawsuit against the NFL complaining about all of those people trying to hit him during football games?

In the waning days of last month's primary election, Mitchell began airing what political historians might someday refer to as "Dicks did this to me!" spots.

In the commercial and in subsequent conference calls, Mitchell produced Giri Giridhar, a 69-year-old New Jersey man, who claimed he had been finagled out of $55,000 in 1989 after he attended a financial seminar sponsored by the late self-styled financial guru Charles Givens, in which his then-associate, John Dicks, had participated.

In time, Giridhar received a settlement in the dispute, which also included a confidentiality agreement not to discuss the matter in public.

Five days after Mitchell exposed the Giridhar brouhaha, he defeated Dicks by slightly fewer than 700 votes.

Cheesy Campaign?

Was Mitchell's eleventh-hour dredging up of an event in Dicks' life from almost 20 years ago a sleazy, cheesy, below-the-belt, tacky exercise in negative campaigning? You betcha! Did it work? You betcha!

But by comparison, down in Sarasota, Democrat Christine Jennings' attacks on incumbent Republican Rep. Vern Buchanan, openly accusing him of corruption and other assorted hanky-panky, make the relationship between Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger look like the Cleavers.

Sure Mitchell's strategy against Dicks was over the top and Giridhar may very well have violated his shut-your-yap agreement. So what?

This was a political campaign. It wasn't a game of Parcheesi, for crying out loud.

After Mitchell aired his accusations, Dicks didn't spend one dime of a campaign war chest in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to vigorously rebut them. Would it have made a difference?

Perhaps. But John Dicks didn't lose this race solely because of low-blow campaign tactics, entertaining though they were.

He lost because, ironically, John Dicks wasn't willing to make the campaign investment in himself.

Keyword: Book of Ruth, to read and comment on Daniel Ruth's blog.

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