Hispanic voters wage brutal ad war

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By Stephen Dinan

Think the campaign's nasty in English? Try it en Espanol. For the first time, both presidential campaigns are engaged in a brutal, almost completely negative war in Spanish-language commercials, all but overwhelming their other messages to Spanish-speaking voters.

"It's much more harsh. Usually Spanish-language advertising is very sort of softball, inclusive, apple pie kinds of messages," said Louis DeSipio, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. "This is the first year I can think of national commercials coming from both parties, Spanish-language ads taking a harsh message. And it's come early."

For the exploding Hispanic population, graduating to negative advertising is another political coming of age. But it also serves as a reminder that there are two different campaigns going on - one for the English-language audience and another, with a different emphasis, for voters who speak predominantly Spanish, and playing out in both Spanish-language news coverage and ads.

English-language voters receive a steady dose on newscasts and in ads of William Ayers and Charles H. Keating Jr., horse-race coverage of who's up and who's down, and a back and forth over who is more "dishonorable."

Spanish-language audiences, though, have seen Mr. McCain attack Mr. Obama on immigration and Latin American issues, including his willingness to meet with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Mr. Obama responded with ads trying to tie Mr. McCain to Rush Limbaugh on immigration and blasting the Republican for the being unprepared on the economy.

A decade ago the few Spanish-language ads run were clunky translations of English ads. Political pros quickly realized that didn't connect. But for years the pros concluded Spanish-language negative ads still didn't work. That began to change in the 2004 presidential campaign when the Bush-Cheney campaign, along with the positive ads, mixed in ads on abortion and gay marriage to attack Sen. John Kerry.

"There was a dramatic evolution and it took the Republican strategists from 2000, when they almost exclusively aired positive ads, to 2004, when I'd say virtually the same exact strategists decided that the Hispanic electorate was ready for intensely negative advertising," said Adam J. Segal of Johns Hopkins University's Hispanic Voter Project.

The campaigns started out positive this year, but turned nasty after Mr. McCain fired off a commercial this summer arguing Mr. Obama tried to sink the Senate's immigration bill - a charge that's been debunked by myriad fact checkers.

Mr. Obama responded with a commercial linking Mr. McCain, a longtime supporter of Hispanic causes and of citizenship for illegal immigrants, to Rush Limbaugh, a talk show host who harshly criticized amnesty and who Hispanic rights groups say has injected hate into the immigration debate. When Mr. McCain ran a second ad on the subject, Mr. Obama fired back with a commercial arguing Mr. McCain "wants to hide the fact that he's the one who turned his back on us."

Both of them are playing loose with the truth, said Maria Elena Salinas, co-anchor of Noticiero Univision, the Spanish-language network's nightly newscast, who is also a columnist.