On Tuesday, voters in New York's 20th congressional district will go to the polls to choose a successor to ex-Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, who now occupies Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's old seat in the United States Senate. So, we have just over 72 hours before any efforts on the part of the candidates, and the party organs and committees cease to be truly useful-- and today the NRCC is putting the issue of the death penalty for terrorists front-and-center in the race:
This doesn't strike me as your typical party committee, final-few-days type ad. It doesn't involve scary music, scary voiceovers, genuinely outrageous statements (either in text or by a narrator), or similar. The subject matter is, of course, inflammatory and provocative-- and the ad will garner criticism for that (liberals will of course whine that it's scaremongering and trying to make voters think that Democrats are weak on going after and punishing terrorists-- all true, to a point, though I'm confident the DCCC has done plenty to scaremonger using economic policy as a point to tee-off from, and to make voters think Republicans don't have any plans to fix the economy, which is, incidentally, not true). But it's not a really nasty, dirty campaign ad-- and campaign ads aren't designed to be nice, anyway. In my opinion, so long as they don't include grevious mischaracterizations or blatant factual inaccuracies, I'm not one for picking them apart or overly critiquing them. Politics, it is said, ain't beanbag....
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