The "background noise" drifting across the Potomac River has also complicated matters for Kilgore. With the conservative movement arrayed in a circular firing line over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme Court, and while White House officials and numerous congressional Republicans find themselves ensnared in criminal investigations, Kilgore's crime-busting image may be tainted by association with a national party steeped in corruption. (Howell refused to discuss with me Rove's absence from a Kilgore fundraiser he was scheduled to headline--he cancelled at the last minute as the threat of indictment loomed.)

By August Kaine was nipping at Kilgore's heels. Kilgore responded by stoking fears of a local Latino gang acting as a Trojan horse for Al Qaeda. "We need to know who is here when MS-13 is being contacted by Al Qaeda," he declared on a Charlottesville-based radio show. Despite an embarrassing rebuke from the FBI, Kilgore stood behind his remarks, citing an article in the right-wing Washington Times as evidence. "In this post-9/11 world, we have got to be ever-vigilant to make sure Al Qaeda does not get a toehold in the United States," he told the paper on August 23.

Seeking to reverse Kaine's momentum, the Kilgore camp chose the race's final debate, on October 9, as the occasion to launch a daring homestretch strategy. It was foreshadowed when debate moderator Larry Sabato asked Kilgore and Kaine to pledge to run a minimum of 51 percent positive advertisements for the remainder of the race. Kaine quickly agreed, but Kilgore hesitated. He vowed to "stand by [his] ads," then attacked Kaine's record as an attorney defending criminals facing the death penalty. "Tim Kaine is too liberal on this issue," Kilgore declared, hammering home a focus group-tested attack line.

Almost as soon as the candidates left their lecterns, Howell lit the heavy artillery. His first salvo took the form of Kelly Timbrook, a blonde, middle-aged widow of a police officer who was slain by a Jamaican man facing deportation for illegal gun possession. Speaking directly into the camera and choking back tears, Timbrook gave an account of the murder:

"Edward Bell was a drug dealer illegally in this country. He was basically waiting for Rick underneath the stairs and shot him a few inches from his face. When they told me, I fell to my knees screaming. Edward Bell is in jail currently waiting on death row. Tim Kaine called for a moratorium on the death penalty. How could you not think the death penalty was appropriate? That's not justice. When Tim Kaine calls the death penalty murder, I find it offensive. And I don't trust Tim Kaine to uphold that law."

Timbrook's description of Bell shooting her husband "a few inches from his face" was punctuated by the sound of a gunshot. Key phrases like "a drug dealer illegally in this country" were interspersed in bold text with her image. A dark piano soundtrack underscored Timbrook's script.

The ad was at once intimate and confrontational, and like so many of Howell's creations, it commanded attention. "Emotion, whether it's humor, angst, whether it makes you laugh or cry, it helps people to respond," Howell explained. "We're in a sound-bite world, and you have to work to get people's attention."

Unfortunately for the Kilgore campaign, some of the attention the spot generated proved counterproductive. The lawyer who secured a death penalty verdict against Bell, Paul Thomson, blasted the ad in the Virginia press as "inherently distasteful" and pointed out that it contained a glaring falsehood: Bell, in fact, was not in the country illegally at the time of the murder. Thomson was so incensed he contacted the Kaine campaign.

Howell pleaded ignorance to the specifics of Bell's case. "The guy was in trouble and he was about to be deported, I think," Howell said. "And he just happened to be--technically didn't want to be thrown out of the country, I think. And I'm telling you, I'd love to belabor that with you, I just don't have the...I can't stand to talk to somebody in the media and be wrong."

So was Timbrook's statement an insidious appeal to prejudice? Again, Howell presented himself as a naïve bystander.

"Basically he [Bell] had jeopardized... you've got to verify this," Howell explained. "But basically, the guy had his visa revoked because of his record, and INS was looking for him to throw him out of the country. He thought it was an INS bust or whatever. That's something you've got to--don't write anything about that, because I don't... I know in the moment, it was almost like an extra nugget. It was almost an extra line when talking to her about it. It was sort of germane to the discussion. It wasn't intentional. It sort of found its way there."

"Nothing is accidental in this business," said David Eichenbaum, a media consultant employed by the Kaine campaign, whose firm, Struble/Eichenbaum, worked for Daschle and Cleland during their losses to Howell's clients. "If something is in an ad, it is meant to be there."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.