Critics of Health Care Law Outspending Its Supporters on Ads

WASHINGTON â€" Seven months before the core provisions of President Obama’s health care law are to take effect, most television advertising that mentions the law continues to come from its opponents.

The Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, an outside group, ran an advertisement last month in Lexington and Louisville praising Senator Mitch McConnell for opposing the health care law.

Since the law’s passage in March 2010, critics have spent a total of about $400 million on television ads that refer to it, according to a new analysis by the Campaign Media Analysis Group at Kantar Media, which tracks such spending. Supporters have spent less than a quarter of that â€" about $75 million â€" on ads that cast the law in a positive light, according to the analysis.

The biggest advertiser in support of the law has been the Department of Health and Human Services, which has run educational ads that mention it. Most of the negative ads have come from Republican outside groups, including Crossroads GPS, which was founded by Karl Rove and other top Republican strategists, and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Spending on ads that mention the law dropped steeply after last fall’s presidential election â€" only about $4 million has been spent since then, according to Kantar, including $2.5 million on ads that are critical of the law and $1.5 million on ads promoting it. Recent negative ads have come from Republican political candidates like former Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who won a special election for a House seat last month, and from conservative advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity.

In North Carolina, Americans for Prosperity has a new 30-second ad celebrating “a new day” in North Carolina politics because of “a fresh crop of leaders” who are “bringing conservative reforms.” Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, won election there last fall, giving the party full control in the state for the first time in more than a century. “The threat of Obamacare? Minimized,” the narrator says. Like a number of other Republican states, North Carolina has declined to expand Medicaid as called for under the law.

Some of the recent negative ads have next year’s elections in mind. The Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, an outside group, ran an ad last month in Lexington and Louisville praising Senator Mitch McConnell for opposing the health care law. Mr. McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, is up for re-election in Kentucky next year. “It’s already causing layoffs,” the narrator says of the law. “Higher premiums are next. Mitch McConnell saw it coming. Leading the fight against Obamacare.”

The analysis also counted several recent ads by Newsmax, a conservative media company, promoting the “Obamacare Survival Guide,” a book published by an affiliate of the company. Those ads have run around the country, according to the analysis, at a cost of more than $1 million.

Elizabeth Wilner, vice president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, said it was “extremely unusual” for a law to remain the subject of political ads for so long after its passage. She also questioned whether all the advertising has significantly swayed public opinion. Polls by the Kaiser Family Foundation have consistently found Americans to be evenly divided on the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, with slightly more opposing than supporting it.

“You could say all the spending on negative ads about the A.C.A. has kept it from becoming more popular,” Ms. Wilner said. “But it certainly hasn’t dramatically changed people’s opinions about it.”

The law will require most Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty starting in January. The federal government and a number of states are rushing to finish building insurance marketplaces, known as exchanges, where millions of Americans are supposed to be able to buy coverage starting in October.

Democrats are worried about potential backlash in next fall’s midterm elections, particularly if there are any problems with the exchanges or other aspects of carrying out the law. Mr. McConnell recently predicted that the law would be the biggest issue in Congressional races next year.

But Ms. Wilner said she expected to see more Democratic spending on ads embracing the law â€" or at least its popular elements â€" leading up to November 2014.

“We know, given what’s coming with the implementation of the law, that it could potentially affect more voters’ decisions in 2014 than it did in 2010 or 2012,” she said. “We will see more Democratic advertising about it, I’m sure. Democrats have to talk about it. It’s being implemented, they can’t ignore it. They’ve got to try to look at the bright side of it.”

In all, the Health and Human Services Department has run about $46 million worth of ads referring to the law since March 2010, according to the analysis. It spent about $1.4 million on one ad during open enrollment for Medicare late last year, for example, that told viewers to “check out the preventive benefits you get after the health care law.”

The department is planning to begin a broad outreach effort this month that may include more television advertising. Meanwhile, the California Endowment, a private foundation, is running television ads promoting the law in Spanish in that state.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 5, 2013, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Critics of Health Care Law Outspending Its Supporters on Ads.

As Vandals Take to National Parks, Some Point to Social Media

Vandals Put Marks on Nation’s Parks and Show Them Off Online

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Graffiti on a cactus last week in Saguaro National Park in Arizona. Many of the giant cactuses are 150 years old.

SAGUARO NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. â€" When Steve Bolyard checked out a report of black paint on some of the park’s majestic saguaros â€" cactuses whose towering bodies and upraised arms are as emblematic of the American West as red-rock buttes and skittering tumbleweeds â€" he did not expect to see ganglike calligraphy covering more of them than he could easily count.

Andy L. Fisher, the chief of interpretation and outreach at Saguaro, last week along a trail.

“It was too much,” said Mr. Bolyard, a park ranger. The same sort of symbols one might see on a subway train were scattered along the spiny forest last month. Rangers eventually found at least 45 graffiti tags in the park, including 16 on the slow-growing and fragile saguaro, the paint obscuring part of the green skins where the plants store the chlorophyll to draw nourishment from the sun.

It was the latest example of a trend that has been unnerving park officials from Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado to Arches in Utah and Joshua Tree in California. Just as drought and rapid development have caused a rise in encounters between humans and wild animals on the edges of many American cities, the wilder side of urban life â€" vandalism, graffiti and litter â€" has found its way into the wilderness.

The cause of this recent spike in graffiti on public lands is unclear, but some park personnel say there is reason to believe that it coincides with the rise of social media. “In the old days,” said Lorna Lange, the spokeswoman for Joshua Tree, “people would paint something on a rock â€" it wouldn’t be till someone else came along that someone would report it and anybody would know about it.”

She added, “with social media people take pictures of what they’ve done or what they’ve seen. It’s much more instantaneous.” And that instant gratification could stimulate the impulse to deface.

While there has been graffiti in national parks since before they were parks, with covered wagon pioneers carving their names into cliffsides as they made their slow way west, this is something new, park officials say. Every year brings more incidents of a sort that evokes the kind of lawlessness and decay more associated with big cities.

“We just haven’t seen this type of vandalism in the past,” said Darla Sidles, the superintendent at Saguaro.

Vandals have spray painted over ancient petroglyphs and painted boasts on famous rock formations. They have chopped up precious plant specimens, knocked down stalactites and dumped just about anything you can imagine beside crystal clear streams.

Gannon Frain, 28, a frequent visitor to Western parks, has been accumulating photos documenting the destruction. “You get a lot of the ‘Kilroy was here,’ sort of thing,” he said. “A lot of people just think they are special â€" the rules don’t apply to them and they’ve got an inflated sense of self-worth about getting someplace remote.”

He added, “It’s one thing to see a pioneer’s inscription on a wall. It’s another to see the signature of the 1,237,000th of 2 million visitors.” In recent years, that sort of defacement has been on the increase, particularly in remote areas. And in Joshua Tree and Saguaro, it has escalated this year into wholesale vandalism of archaeological sites and remote vistas.

Few of the carvers and painters are caught. Cleanup costs run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. “When budgets are this tight,” said Andy L. Fisher, the chief of interpretation and outreach at Saguaro, “it’s not like we have a slush fund to go and clean up vandalism. Dealing with this means we’re not doing something else.”

And while social media may be one reason for the recent rise in incidents, technology can work both ways. Ms. Lange said social media may prove helpful in tracking the origins of a graffiti binge that recently scarred ancient archaeological sites. Cleanup efforts have led to the indefinite closing of Rattlesnake Canyon, a popular hiking area, in part to protect possible sites of native art from copycat graffitists.

Among the other park units that count graffiti as an everyday problem are Glen Canyon National Recreation Area on the Utah-Arizona border, where hikers and boaters paint and carve their marks, and Rocky Mountain National Park, where graffiti has appeared at remote destinations like the Twin Owls rock formation.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 5, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Vandals Put Marks on Nation’s Parks and Show Them Off Online.

Special Election Timing in New Jersey Points to a Weak G.O.P. Field

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has scheduled an Oct. 16 special election to replace the deceased Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, a Democrat. Mr. Christie will appoint a replacement for Mr. Lautenberg in the interim, but he has yet to announce his pick. His choice of timing for the special election, however, may indicate that he expects the Republican candidates to be weak.

The timing is unusual in that New Jersey will hold its gubernatorial election, in which Mr. Christie will be on the ballot, just three weeks later on Nov. 5. Under state law, Mr. Christie could have arranged for the Senate election to be held on the same day. (He could also perhaps have delayed it until November 2014, although that would have relied on a more controversial interpretation of the state’s statutes.)

One theory is that Mr. Christie is concerned about anything that might interfere with his chances of re-election or suppress his margin of victory. If so, however, the timing of the special election would qualify as exceptionally risk averse, especially for a politician who has a reputation for taking chances. Mr. Christie has an overwhelming lead in polls against the likely Democratic nominee, State Senator Barbara Buono, and he remains extremely popular in New Jersey. There is always a chance that news or political events could intervene between now and November to harm Mr. Christie’s standing, but his losing the race would represent one of the greatest political collapses in recent memory.

Mr. Christie might also be interested in helping Republican candidates for the state legislature. Democrats control both the Senate and the Assembly, but all seats will be up on the Nov. 5 ballot. With a popular Republican governor heading the ticket and no interference from the United States Senate race, the G.O.P. might have a better chance of winning one or both chambers.

Of course, Mr. Christie could also have used his coattails to help his party’s United States Senate nominee. His move might suggest that his ambitions remain mainly in New Jersey, and less on the national stage. Then again, being re-elected â€" and having a more successful second term with less Democratic opposition in the state legislature â€" could also leave him in a stronger position were he to run for president in 2016.

The implicit thread between all these hypotheses is that Mr. Christie seems to view the Senate contest as a liability. As I wrote on Monday, a strong G.O.P. nominee could potentially make the race competitive, although the Republican would probably remain an underdog. But with a lackluster candidate in a blue-leaning state, the Republicans would be all but conceding the race against Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, the most likely Democratic nominee, who has strong favorability ratings in the state and is expected to build a robust and expensive campaign operation.

While some national Republicans are annoyed with Mr. Christie’s decision, they may not be privy to all the information he had about which Republican candidates might have been interested in Mr. Lautenberg’s seat. It’s plausible that Mr. Christie could have helped a reasonably good G.O.P. nominee to a narrow victory. But if none were interested in the race, it may have been a lost cause.

It may be reasonable to infer, then, that Mr. Christie evaluated the Republican field and did not like what he saw â€" and that Mr. Booker is poised to win the Senate seat with relative ease.