By Bob Gibson

    Politicians really aren’t as bad as their opponents’ TV ads make them out to be, but you couldn’t prove it by their own ads.

    In a race for the political advertising gutter, both sides are apt to cut corners, shade truths, take facts well out of context and place sinister implications on their opponents’ words while slowing images enough to scare voters into believing the targets of such 30-second stink bombs are, or should be, doing perp walks.

    Any campaign spending more than $1 million these days appears more adept at throwing pungent slop at an opponent than making a strong enough case for the candidate spending the dough that he doesn’t have to throw the bitchin’ stink.

    Republicans point to Democrat Creigh Deeds and say the candidate for governor brags about being a big spender, not bothering to mention that Deeds’ budget amendments sought funding to bring Virginia teacher salaries up to the national average. That’s a goal Republican Bob McDonnell also endorsed.

    Democrats imply that McDonnell would try to strip married couples of the right to contraception when the closest he ever came to voting for such an unlikely ban was favoring a measure aimed at keeping birth-control pills out of the hands of James Madison University students at their student health dispensary.

    Voters are looking for big ideas and honest dialogue. Instead they are given Democratic ads trying to scare voters about the socially conservative McDonnell and Republican ads trying to paint Deeds as a tax-and-spend liberal.

    Scare tactics in the ads may turn a few voters the other way but also are likely, if not fully intended, to keep many voters away from the polls.

    It’s as if both sides collectively are saying, “No big ideas, no trust, just stay home.“

    If moderate or inattentive Virginians succumb to the scary ads, a smaller electorate of the Republican base and the Democratic base could end up deciding the Nov. 3 elections.

    The men running are more decent than their ad campaigns indicate. Neither one is about to bankrupt Virginia or ban us back to the Stone Age.

    One of them is going to win and then will have to work with the other party to get much done. Working across the aisle can be easier if you haven’t just spent millions of dollars trashing the other side.

    Neither man will singlehandedly raise tax rates or reduce contraceptive or reproductive rights without the majority support of both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly. 

    No Virginian is going to benefit from better schools or roads or transit unless the two sides can work together toward solutions that generally involve consensus and compromise.

    In the absence of big ideas in a governor’s race—and there are not too many floating out there this election—other factors decide elections.

    One factor at play this year is the national political dialogue and the agenda of President Obama.

    The major media and the Republicans, each for their own reasons, have decided to make the Deeds-McDonnell race into something it might not be: the measuring stick of Obama’s success or failure.

    That’s a little like sending the unpopular owner of the Baltimore Orioles a note saying it’s time for the unpopular owner of the Washington Redskins to go.

    Wrong bark. Wrong tree, perhaps. But many Republicans in Virginia want to continue the decades-long trend of this state choosing a governor from the opposite party than the winner of the White House the previous year. The GOP base is simply more enthusiastic this year. 

    Republicans have reasons for wanting to nationalize the Virginia race. A rejection of Deeds allows them to take the mansion in Richmond for the first time since Jim Gilmore lived there and claim it is an assault on every Democrat running for Congress in 2010.

    Media movers and shakers think a race that measures Obama’s first 10 months in office is a bigger story than a race that is decided by Virginians on Virginia issues, so they pretend to cover it as such.

    Democrats, meanwhile, campaign without big new ideas and seem locked into running on past successes and past fears.

    “Vote for a D like Creigh because you liked what we Ds did five years ago” and because he never wrote a controversial thesis 20 years ago that scares people who fear social conservatives, they would argue.

    Waving the bloody thesis carries a fear factor, a yuck factor and diminishing returns. If Deeds loses, his decision to run hard against the McDonnell thesis will no doubt be fat fodder for new theses, if not a dissing dissertation.

    There are positive ideas in each campaign. Just don’t look to see too many of them on TV, where the real money of campaigns continues to distort and attack and twist out of context until both candidates resemble creatures from the dark lagoon.

    They aren’t really. They just campaign that way.

    And they probably will until their highly paid consultants tell them that no longer works.

    I am afraid the bottom of the lagoon is not yet in sight.