judgesonmerit.org

Everyone knows how dirty election advertising can be. Negative campaign ads are easy to spot – with the clichéd black and white low-angle images of the opposing candidate, dramatic fade-ins of damning headlines, and music that would make Alfred Hitchcock proud. Mudslinging and negative campaigning is used at all levels of politics and by both major parties, but during last year’s presidential campaign, some attacks took on a particular quality and picked up lots of media coverage, as opponents of the then-candidate Obama threw out terms like “friends of terrorist,” “socialist,” and beyond.

On Friday, Capitol Ideas with John L. Micek reported about a banner ad that ran on the website GrassrootsPA. The banner read, “Tired of Barack Obama, Ed Rendell, Alren Specter and big government Democrats ruining our nation?” The background was Soviet-red, the names Soviet-yellow. The “O” in “Obama” contained a Soviet hammer and sickle.

Banner Ad as seen on the website Grassroots PA.

NOTE: JudgesOnMerit, PMC, and PMCAction are non-partisan and our cause is a non-partisan one. We do not support any judicial candidates or political parties, and we are equally critical of all problems with the judicial selection process.

After a few seconds, the ad flashed to a blue background and read, “Hit them where it hurts. The voting booth! On Nov. 3^rd, Vote for Supreme Court candidate Joan Orie Melvin and your Republican judicial ticket.” The ad was paid for by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania. It is unclear whether Judge Orie Melvin had any knowledge of the banner before it was run. [Note - the ad seems to have been taken down. The current ad running on the site uses the same color scheme, but does not have names and lost the hammer and sickle].

This seemingly marks the first time a state’s Republican Party has used Soviet imagery directly in an attack on Democrats. And it is almost unfathomable why they chose to do so in support of their judicial candidates. As we’ve predicted, nasty partisan campaigning with no relevance to helping choose judges has unfortunately found its way into Pennsylvania’s judicial race. Such attacks surely don’t belong in any forum designed to help the public choose a justice on the Supreme Court.

The Philadelphia Daily News’ Will Bunch expressed his reaction to the ad on his blog Attytood at Philly.com:

“[I]t’s hard to say what is more appalling — equating the sitting president of the United States with the Soviet dictators who slaughtered their political enemies and sent others to brutal gulags, or the cause this ad is promoting: The election of a judge to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.”

This sentiment reflects one of the critical flaws with Pennsylvania’s method of selecting judges and justices in partisan elections. As Gort42, another blogger covering the story said,

“The thing that we want in our Judges is to be impartial and not take political sides no matter what party they belong to.”

One can only speculate what logical connection the Republican Party of Pennsylvania was hoping to make between a belief that the Democratic leadership in Washington are akin to communists and a conclusion that Pennsylvanians should therefore vote Republicans onto the state benches.

We couldn’t put it any better than did commenter Drew on the Capitol Ideas blog:

“Is this type of naked partisanship really what we want from our judges and justices? We need to end elections for judges and implement merit selection.”

True communists may not like to hear us say it, but – Amen, Drew.