Campaign Ad

It's hard to believe that just a week ago there was talk of a thaw in Washington. Two unlikely senators had come together and created a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks . One of them, Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), a gun-owning Democrat who'd once shot a hole through a piece of legislation in a campaign ad — literally — was getting recognized as a new leader in the Senate. The other, Republican Senator Patrick Toomey (Pa.), had formerly headed the Club for Growth and been ...

It's hard to believe that just a week ago there was talk of a thaw in Washington. Two unlikely senators had come together and created a bipartisan proposal to expand background checks . One of them, Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), a gun-owning Democrat who'd once shot a hole through a piece of legislation in a campaign ad — literally — was getting recognized as a new leader in the Senate. The other, Republican Senator Patrick Toomey (Pa.), had formerly headed the Club for Growth and been ...

A new Internet ad by the president's reelection campaign features a portrait of the first family asking supporters to "help the Obamas stand up for working Americans. " The appeal, a departure from the typical Obama messaging, provides an early glimpse of the role the president's wife and daughters are likely to play in his campaign. In the months to come, political strategists expect to see the first family used as a political asset. "The value of the family is enormous," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.

Today is Election Day, when Americans will choose the next president of the United States. At KidsPost, we've written a lot about the election to help kids understand what they were seeing in other parts of the newspaper or on television. We explained presidential debates ; we even came up with an art project you can do Tuesday night while you watch election results with your family. But it was our story about political advertising that prompted Catherine Odey's sixth-grade students at Rocky Hill Middle...

If you thought you were living through a particularly nasty presidential primary season, turns out you were right. Four years ago, just 6 percent of campaign advertising in the GOP primaries amounted to attacks on other Republicans; in this election, that figure has shot up to more than 50 percent, according to an analysis of advertising trends. And the negative ads are not just more frequent — they also appear to be more vitriolic. In 2008, one of harshest ads Mitt Romney ran...

Sen. Jon Tester's massive right hand is capable of a vise-grip handshake. In old photographs, however, the Montana wheat-and-barley farmer often has his left hand in the pocket of his barn jacket. Or down by the leg of his jeans. The three middle fingers on that hand are gone, lost to the blades of a meat grinder when he was 9 years old. The 55-year-old Democrat still uses that hand when fixing the combine at his farm , flipping through a family album or picking up a burger ...

Finally, a conservative who likes President Obama. And he's not just any conservative, mind you. He's a capital-C Conservative, British Prime Minister David Cameron. On his official visit to Washington, the Briton could not say enough good things about his American host. On Iran: "The president's tough, reasonable approach has united the world. " On Libya: "Mr. President, Barack, about Libya . . . none of that would have been possible without the overwhelming support and overwhelming...

David Bossie, a veteran Republican campaign operative who made his mark investigating the Clintons, thought his group could offer a conservative answer to Michael Moore's successful films. After Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" premiered in 2004, Bossie's Citizens United group released "Celsius 41.11. " And after it became clear that Bossie's longtime enemy Hillary Rodham Clinton would run for president, Citizens United released another flick: "Hillary: The Movie. " Featuring a who's-who cast of right-wing commentators, the...

A very strange story, that 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles "baseball cards" with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders is significant. The article could have been titled "Barack Obama: Drone Warrior. " Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign.

In 2008, it was Joe the Plumber . This year, it's Joe the Steelworker. Joe Soptic, 62, has become a go-to figure for supporters of President Obama , appearing this week in his second campaign ad talking about being laid off from a Kansas City, Mo., steel plant that was taken over by Bain Capital in 1993. In the ad, released Tuesday by the super PAC Priorities USA and titled "Understands," Soptic makes his most heated claim to date, suggesting a link between his wife's death five years...

Does anybody check the Fact Checker? In his Oct. 28 analysis, " Putting an Obama ad on troops into context ," Glenn Kessler assigned three Pinocchios to the Obama campaign ad that asserts Mitt Romney termed as "tragic" withdrawing all troops from Iraq. Kessler quoted Romney at length, and then said: "In other words, the phrase tragic referred to the failure to not reach a deal — not bringing the troops home. " Apart from the insertion of "not" before "reach," which appears to be a typo in that sentence, the antecedent paragraph quoted from...

The men and women of Madison Avenue can't believe what they're seeing: During every commercial break, there's a snarling candidate not seen since . . . the last commercial break. To advertising executives, this onslaught of attack ads looks like a giant waste of money. It certainly runs counter to every risk-conscious maxim the industry has honed since the days of "Mad Men. " First, advertisers for consumer products have learned to be cautious about intruding into viewers' living rooms; they don't let a...

Maybe you've seen commercials on TV for one of the presidential candidates. President Barack Obama is running for reelection, and he and his opponent, Mitt Romney, are spending lots of money to broadcast commercials to voters. They hope that the ads will convince people to vote for them on Election Day, just as a toy company or cereal maker hopes you'll buy their product after watching their ads. READ: Why are debates important? QUIZ: Could you be president? In fact,...

So, are positive ads or negative ads more effective? One way to figure that out is to make your own. Pick a product — a toy, an electronic device, a type of food — and make two advertisements about that product. You can make ads that might appear in the newspaper, on the radio, on TV or on the Internet. First, make a positive ad. Think about things that make you like the product. For example, if you're making an ad for a soup, you can talk about how delicious and creamy it is, how it makes you feel toasty and warm on a...

Don't expect any ads for President Obama across the top of Prospect.org, the online incarnation of liberal monthly magazine the American Prospect. However warmly editors there may feel about him, it is blocking ads from his campaign as part of a pricing dispute that has pitted many political Web sites — on both the left and right — against their ideological allies. The standoff is an unintended consequence of a broad shift in political advertising this campaign season. More money is going into online...

For the first time that Laurie Weahkee can remember, Native American heritage has become an issue in national politics. Under other circumstances, that might be welcome. But in this case, Weahkee, a Navajo, Zuni and Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico, is appalled at what she is hearing. Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) has focused his reelection campaign's attention on the self-proclaimed Native American heritage of his Democratic challenger , Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren.

Fake blood? Latex masks? Watching "Halloween 3" reruns with buttered popcorn popped in trans-fats? Nah. Let me point you to something that will truly scare you — and it's not another Herman Cain campaign ad . It was the testimony given in a Montgomery County courtroom last week. Geniuses working at the Apple store in Bethesda heard bone-chilling screams, grunts and thuds coming from the Lululemon Athletica shop next door to them one night last March. The manager even got another...

"Hillary: The Movie" came and went without much of a splash last year. Reviews were not flattering, Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign waned and one devastating critique made sure that the scalding documentary would never become a blockbuster hit. It came from a panel of judges in Washington that said "H:TM" was not really a movie at all. The court sided with the Federal Election Commission and said the film was a 90-minute campaign...

In 2008, it was Joe the Plumber . This year, it's Joe the Steelworker. Joe Soptic, 62, has become a go-to figure for supporters of President Obama , appearing this week in his second campaign ad talking about being laid off from a Kansas City, Mo., steel plant that was taken over by Bain Capital in 1993. In the ad, released Tuesday by the super PAC Priorities USA and titled "Understands," Soptic makes his most heated claim to date, suggesting a link between his wife's death five years ago and the Bain...

There will be no summer idyll for voters in swing states, who will be deluged with tens of millions of dollars in political ads over the next month as part of an intensifying broadcast war through the Olympic Games. In addition to spots from President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, many ads will be aired by independent nonprofit groups that are not required to reveal who is funding them. The surge comes ahead of a legal deadline that could force some groups to begin identifying...