Vampires (2)

Barack Obama, in the Illinois legislature, forthrightly battled for safeguards to prevent wrongful convictions, and cruel and counterproductive mandatory minimum sentence for juveniles, and a stupid law that would exploit guilt by association to fry more criminals. Said the conservatives: opportunity knocks!

Starting Tuesday, a group of conservative activists led by Floyd Brown, author of the famous Willie Horton ad used so effectively against Michael Dukakis in 1988, will begin a campaign to tar Obama as weak on crime and terrorism....

Brown says the initial effort, a 60-second spot called "Victims," will be aired later this month in North Carolina and e-mailed to between 3 and 7 million conservatives this week, with a plea for more funding to further spread the message.... The new ad recounts the deaths of three Chicago residents in 2001 at the hands of criminal gangs. "That same year, a Chicago state senator named Barack Obama voted against expanding the death penalty for gang-related murders," an ominous female narrator intones. "So the question is, can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?"...

The initial spot also consciously mimics the themes from one of the most famous, and controversial, attack ads in modern political history, the Willie Horton ad. That spot, which was also funded outside a campaign, blamed Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic nominee, for the weekend furlough that allowed a convicted felon to commit another rape. At the time, domestic crime was a major national issue, though it has not registered as a significant concern in public opinion polls during this election cycle.

Brown's new ad focuses on a 2001 vote by Obama in the Illinois Senate to oppose a bill that would have expanded the use of the death penalty if the perpetrator of a crime belonged to a gang. The links between Obama's vote on that issue and the deaths of three Chicago resident's are indirect and tenuous, as is the further connection the ad draws between the issue of Obama's position on the death penalty and the issue of international terrorism.

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