ARRIVING IN ATLANTA on a recent Sunday afternoon, I turned on my hotel room’s TV and soon saw, staring back at me, the patrician face of David Perdue. Georgia’s Republican senior senator was the target of an attack ad paid for by his opponent, Jon Ossoff, in a runoff campaign for his seat; it suggested that Perdue had traded stocks with insider knowledge of the pandemic. A few minutes later, Ossoff, who at 33 is attempting to become the youngest U.S. senator in four decades, appeared in a sunnier TV spot, talking about how he would work with President-elect Joe Biden. This was followed immediately by an attack ad on the Democratic candidate in a second Georgia Senate runoff—the Reverend Raphael War nock of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. I walked away for a minute, and when I looked back at the TV, there was Kelly Loeffler, Warnock’s opponent and by far the richest member of the Senate, in a different attack on her pandemic stock trading. A Honda ad mercifully cut in, only to fade in to a Warnock ad featuring local police and sheriffs, soon followed by an Ossoff attack on Perdue and his support of Donald Trump.
I tuned back in the next morning and, by 7 a.m., had seen the Perdue trading spot again; an anti-Warnock ad (twice) with “defund the police” scare language; a new Loeffler clip; the Perdue-Trump ad; the Warnock sheriffs spot; and an ad tying Ossoff to various Democratic bogeymen. I tried switching over to local radio—no relief. Back on TV, I saw, in order: the antiLoeffler ad on stocks, a different antiLoeffler ad on stocks, an ad calling Warnock a radical, an ad calling Ossoff a radical, a proOssoff ad, an anti-Ossoff ad, the two antiLoeffler stocks ads again, the Warnock radical ad, an anti-Ossoff ad, the second anti-Loeffler ad, and the one with Perdue and Trump. I turned off the TV at 8:15.
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