Have anti-Obama ads been a bust?

Toe to Toe

By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYT

For the past year, conservative and Republican groups have spent more than$138 million in a concerted attempt to turn voters against Barack Obama.

The big dog in the effort to drive up Obama's negative job approval ratings, the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, has invested $82.5 million in independent expenditures, mostly for television ads. Restore Our Future hired Larry McCarthy, the media consultant who achieved both recognition and infamy for producing the Willie Horton commercial in 1988. Restore Our Future's hope: to do to Obama what McCarthy did to Michael Dukakis.

So far in the campaign, the right has outspent the left on independent advertising by just over 3 to 1.

Obama's conservative adversaries have had plenty to work with. Median household income has steadily declined, and, until October's employment report was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, unemployment had remained above 8 percent for the first 44 months of Obama's presidency. Since Obama's November 2008 victory, in fact, the labor force participation rate - the percentage of adults actually working - has fallen from 65.8 percent to 63.6 percent, a 2.2 point drop. In other words, a growing number of men and women have dropped out of the workforce altogether.

Despite this abundance of liabilities, Obama's job approval rating over the past year has gone up, not down. By most measures, the massive anti-Obama television, radio and Internet campaign has been a bust.

(More here.)