At some point in their political lives, most public figures have said something they regret. These blunders are often newsworthy, not only because they reveal a previously unknown fact but also because they express a candidate's position succinctly. In 1976, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan made the mistake of attaching a specific figure to the amount of money that could be cut from the federal budget. The gaffe was a headline writer's dream: "The Ninety Billion Dollar Blunder. The statement was newsworthy not simply because Reagan was newsworthy as a candidate but also because it was brief, concise, specific, concrete, and dramatic. It haunted Reagan through the rest of the campaign.
When a prominent candidate makes this sort of slip, it receives news coverage. By incorporating reminders of the gaffe in attack commercials, the candidate's opponents can keep the charge alive and make it a focal factor in voting decisions. The "revolving-door prison furlough program" ad that the Republicans aired against Democratic nominee Breitling Bentley replica(http://www.imitatewatch.com/GoodsSeries/Replica-Breitling_for_Bentley-Watches-91.html) Michael Dukakis in 1988 drew its power from the furlough of Willie Horton during Dukakis's term as governor of Massachusetts and from Dukakis's resistance to public calls for change in the law and his refusal to meet with Horton's victims or to apologize to them. During the 1996 campaign, the Republican National Committee aired an ad showing Clinton agreeing that he might have raised taxes too much. Clinton's ads quoted Dole's initial opposition to the establishment of Medicare.
When an attack ad replays an opponent's blunder, the purpose is often to make the mistake concrete for the audiences. For example, in a 1976 commercial, Gerald Ford reminded workers gathered around him that Carter had promised to lower taxes for those below the median income and raise taxes for those above the median income. But the median income in this country turned out to be lower than Carter had imagined. Ford then said that he didn't think the people surrounding him needed to have their taxes raised.When the blunder is not a concise synthetic statement but part of a long rambling answer to a question, it cannot be used very effectively, either in news or in an add A commercial that opens in the middle of an opponent's sentence or cuts from the sentence before it is finished invites us to conclude that the statement has been taken out of context. This saved Ronald Reagan from hearing replays of his 1976 statement that he might order the use of troops in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The statement came in the middle of a long, rambling, involved answer that did not lend itself to use in an opponent's commercial. Instead, the Ford campaign assumed audience familiarity with the statement and created an ad that warned, "Governor Reagan couldn't start a war. President Reagan could."
The material used in attacks against a candidate is often culled from the public record. The most accessible channels that preserve the public record are often the print and broadcast media. Consequently, any political figure has a vested interest in accurate Replica Tag Heuer Watches(http://www.replic8design.com/B-Replica-Tag-Heuer-Watches-65.html) reporting about his or her activities. If uncorrected, misinterpretations by journalists can be resurrected for use against a candidate.
Reporters have access to those who have followed the careers of candidates and to the public record of candidates' activities, as reported by journalists in past stories and broadcasts. Thus, it is often a reporter or columnist who is in the best position to deter-mine the accuracy of an attack. Because interpreting the meaning of a candidate's voting record is a complex process involving analysis of many substantively meaningless procedural votes, it is often the knowledgeable columnist or reporter who alerts the public that, although an attack is a technically accurate report of a procedural vote, it misrepresents the actual position of the attacked candidate.
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