A controversial campaign ad run last week against Penn alum Harold Ford, Jr. - currently running for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee - has brought the issue of boundaries in political campaigning to the national spotlight, but experts say it is unlikely to make or break the race.
The Republican National Committee financed the ad, a montage of interviews with Tennessee citizens - played by actors - who comment on Ford's policies with sarcastic one-liners. It has since been pulled.
Experts agree that Republicans are playing the race card, given the depiction of a white woman making a sexual advance toward Ford, who is black.
Ford, the Democrat and a 1992 College graduate, is locked in a tight race with the former mayor of Chattanooga, Bob Corker.
The segments include a camouflaged hunter saying, "Ford's right, I do have too many guns," and a bare-shouldered blonde saying, "I met Harold at the Playboy party."
At the end of the ad, she adds, "Harold, call me" and winks at the camera.
Corker's campaign, which did not fund the ad, has distanced itself from it. A spokesman called it "tacky." Ford's campaign has put out a response ad.
Director of Penn's Annenberg Public Policy Center Kathleen Hall Jamieson said the ad is unlikely to affect voters' decisions, particularly due to the response to it.
She added that such an ad would have an impact "only in very close races where an ad is very powerful and doesn't produce a backlash . [and the] attacked candidate [does] not respond quickly and well."
But some Penn students from Tennessee say the ad made a definite impression on them.
"I was offended and appalled when I went home for fall break and saw the ad," said College sophomore Erica Evans, who interned for the Ford campaign last summer.
"It was extremely distasteful and completely out of line. It did not have anything to do with the facts."
"The ad was obviously meant to use sexual innuendo to evoke and play off of racist prejudices, which goes beyond bad politics and into the unacceptable," College sophomore Sean Pitt said.
Yet College freshman Aaron Ecay, also from Tennessee, said the ad did not particularly bother him.
"I find the ad disturbing, but no more so than the dozens of other political ads that we are subjected to every two years," Ecay said.
Engineering freshman and Tennessee native Hughes Tipton said he sees nothing wrong with the ad, especially if the claims are valid.
"It is clearly trying to appeal to the conservative side of voters, and [it] makes claims that would alarm anyone with conservative values," he said.
In a roundtable discussion last Friday on the mid-term, Political Science professor Don Kettl and Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and English professor Dick Polman said Republicans are more "uninhibited" than Democrats when it comes to campaigning.
Kettl remarked on the "negative democracy" produced by such campaign ads, which he said tend to keep people at home rather than going to the polls on election day.
