Barnes, Deal swap cries of lies over ads

Nathan Deal and Roy Barnes on Wednesday accused each other of falsifying quotes or doctoring video in a pair of campaign commercials, and each demanded the other pull the spot from the airwaves.

Neither did, however.

With less than two weeks before the Nov. 2 election, the two top candidates for governor are battling for every advantage. Libertarian John Monds has largely avoided the fray.

The day began with Barnes, the Democrat seeking a return to the office he lost in 2002, calling on Deal to pull a TV spot that is itself a response to a Barnes attack aimed at attracting female voters.

Deal, the Republican former congressman, features a series of mock newspaper headlines and quotes in the spot. One, which Deal said appeared in the Oct. 16 Savannah Morning News, is attributed to Barnes spokeswoman Anna Ruth Williams. But the quote, "Barnes represented the child molester," never actually appeared in the newspaper.

Instead, the article paraphrased Williams as saying Barnes represented a child molester at a bond hearing. The only direct quote from her in the article was that Barnes' work "had nothing to do with the trial."

The Barnes campaign's other issue with the ad was its depiction of what is presumed to be a headline from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution lamenting Barnes' "false, personal attacks." But no such headline ever appeared in the newspaper.

"Roy 2010 is calling on the Deal campaign to remove the ad and hire someone to check their facts more closely, or just plain read the news each morning," Williams said.

Deal's ad is in response to Barnes accusing Deal of supporting efforts to weaken the state's protections for rape victims in court when both Barnes and Deal were in the state Senate. Deal said that wasn't what the legislation did and that as a prosecutor he put rapists in prison.

Deal, meanwhile, called on Barnes to pull a new spot that features actual video of Deal briskly leaving a debate last week while refusing to answer questions from reporters who were tailing after him.

But astute observers at the TV station WXIA noticed that while there were three reporters who actually shouted questions at Deal that night, Barnes' ad features at least five different voices. At least two, it appears, were dubbed into the ad.

"Roy Barnes has distorted the truth about Nathan Deal's record, and now he's gone one step further by presenting his cinema piece as reality," Deal spokesman Brian Robinson said. "Now, even people who believe that Elvis lives, the world is flat, pro wrestling is real and the moon landing was fake couldn't trust anything Roy Barnes says about Nathan Deal."