America: As opinion polls point to a rout of the Republicans in next month's congressional elections, some of the party's candidates are embracing desperate measures, running advertisements that go beyond the negative into the downright defamatory.
The most notorious was directed at the Tennessee Democratic senate candidate Harold Ford, who is African-American, using an attractive blonde actress to say she had met Ford at a Playboy party.
The ad, which was withdrawn after protests that it played to racial stereotypes, ended with the actress winking into the camera and purring "Harold, call me!" Republican candidate Bob Corker is now running a new ad that accuses Ford of wanting "to give the abortion pill to schoolchildren".
Ford has responded with a good-natured ad suggesting that "Bob Corker has been going personal. After me, my family. If I had a dog, he'd probably kick him, too."
Ford is running in a key race that could determine who controls the senate after November 7th, but Democrats running in obscure congressional races have faced equally rough treatment.
Wisconsin congressman Ron Kind, for example, has been accused in one Republican ad of "paying for sex" and Michael Arcuri, a Democrat running for a House seat in New York, is portrayed as using taxpayers' money for phone sex.
In fact, Kind's offence was to oppose a Republican attempt to stop the National Institutes of Health from conducting scientific peer-reviewed studies of sexual behaviour.
Arcuri, a district attorney, did nothing at all, but one of his aides once misdialled the number of state Division of Criminal Justice and reached a porn line with an almost identical number - at a cost of $1.25.
Some negative ads are so extreme as to be funny, such as North Carolina Republican Vernon Robinson's attack on congressman Brad Miller for supporting comprehensive immigration reform.
"These aliens pay no income tax and send their money back to Mexico. Then they take to the streets waving the Mexican flag and demanding more. Unbelievably, Brad Miller voted to allow these illegals to burn the American flag while waving the Mexican flag.
"Brad Miller supports gay marriage and sponsored a Bill to let American homosexuals bring their foreign homosexual lovers to this country on a marriage visa.
"If Miller had his way, America would be nothing but one big fiesta for illegal aliens and homosexuals. But if you elect Vernon Robinson, that party's over," the ad says.
Most negative ads are run on behalf of Republicans, but some Democrats in close races are playing rough as well.
Pennsylvania's Chris Carney is running an advertisement purporting to be about "family values" that highlights allegations that Republican congressman Don Sherwood tried to choke his former mistress.
The most controversial Democratic ad features actor Michael J Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, supporting candidates who support funding embryonic stem-cell research, which some researchers believe could provide a successful treatment for the condition. Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh accused Fox of exaggerating his symptoms or skipping medication to heighten the impact of his message, a charge that Fox denied and for which Limbaugh later apologised.
As election day approaches, both parties are expected to spend millions of dollars on new negative ads, which analysts believe are highly effective, even if voters claim not to like them.
"Look, the electorate is polarised, the stakes are large and neither party has much to run on right now," John Geer, an expert on negative advertising, told the Washington Post yesterday. "You can expect to see some pretty outlandish ads."
The next target could be Jim Webb, a former novelist and the Democratic challenger to Virginia senator George Allen. Allen's campaign yesterday published sexually explicit excerpts from some of Webb's novels, claiming that the passages were demeaning to women and celebrated underage sex.
Webb's campaign has dismissed the story as "pathetic", but Virginia voters can expect to read the steamy passages many times before November 7th, probably on prime-time television.
