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A campaign ad. In sentence fragments.
By Ned | January 3, 2008
Blogging ridiculous campaign ads has become sort of a regular feature on this blog to the point where seeing a candidate stick his or her grinning, well-lit face and vocal approval at the tail-end of some egregious assault on logic and reason gets an almost Pavlovian rush of excitement out of me. Maybe it’s related to the impulse that gets me excited about movies like Robo Vampire and Jack Frost (the horror one, not the family-friendly one). Either way, it’s not healthy. How do I know it’s not healthy? Because when I saw this ad, my first reaction was: “Holy crap, this is amazing!” followed by a second viewing.
The only thing more ridiculous than that ad (and believe me, we’ll get to it in a second) is Huckabee’s sort of but not really aired attack ad. Even disregarding the content of the ad - in which ostensibly pro-life candidate Huckabee takes Romney to task for his pathetically low body count - the method of distribution is really weird. For those who missed my last post on the topic, here are the steps as covered there:
Step 1: Make sleazy attack ad.
Step 2: Refuse to run sleazy attack ad because it’s too sleazy and you still have principles.
Step 3: Hold press conference to talk about your refusal to run the sleazy attack ad nobody knew about anyway and then show a room full of reporters with camcorders the sleazy attack ad in the hopes that a lot of them will run it for free because you’re too principled to buy airtime for it. Or something.
Still with us? That seemed like the extent of Huckabee’s game plan when it came to this ad, and that was pretty weird on its own. But it was about to get weirder.
Step 4: Get Chuck Norris to do your attacking for you. Because nobody ever gets tired of that guy.
Step 5: Realize that nobody besides full-time campaign reporters and news junkies was watching your outrageously phony press conference because it was New Year’s Eve and the reporters you were hoping were going to run it for free decided to just laugh at you.
Step 6: The ad mysteriously ends up running anyway. Oops!
Step 7: Sit tight and hope that everyone drank so heavily the night of your press conference that the event has been effectively erased from campaign history. Do lots of praying to God, who apparently loves Huckabee and hates Romney and reporters anyway.
But back to Giuliani’s ad, which makes Tom Tancredo look like Thomas Jefferson.
This is truly a masterpiece in a campaign that has been filled to the brim with brain-meltingly stupid ads. Let’s deconstruct the reasons why:
1. Context. This is the mother of all Hail Marys. Giuliani, who until a couple of months ago was looking like the Republican nominee, has of late been in total campaign free-fall. It’s less like your run-of-the-mill train wreck than it is a train that crash so hard it did a barrel roll, caught on fire, fell off a cliff, exploded, and then exploded once more for good measure. And the whole thing was in slow motion. Directed by Michael Bay. It’s the kind of public implosion that couldn’t have been funnier if it had happened to a narcissistic, corrupt, authoritarian Batman supervillain. Which, of course, it did.
2. Hyperbole. Giuliani appears to think that we live in a nightmarish dystopic future that makes Children of Men and Blade Runner look like Smurf village. He presents this kind of shameless fear mongering as an argument for his presidency but it comes off more like an argument for fallout bunkers or cyanide pills.
3. Movie trailer delivery. An enemy without borders. Hate without boundaries. A people perverted. A religion betrayed. … America needs a leader who’s ready. If you asked me whether that came from a campaign ad or a teaser trailer for 2008’s smash hit, The Sum of All Missions Impossible: The Hunt for Clear and Present Danger, I probably would have picked the latter. Giuliani’s rationale for why he should be president has always been based on a worldview taken almost entirely from Tom Clancy novels and 24. Never before has a campaign ad made it so blaringly, obnoxiously obvious.
So much for the calm before the storm. I naïvely thought the GOP frontrunners, after months and months of aggressive campaigning, would spend the last week or so before Iowa trying to exude calm and paternal wisdom, knowing that they had already laid out their case and now only needed to provide the voters with a gentle reminder. Instead, it’s like they’re trying to make those months of over-the-top rhetoric seem quiet and reserved by comparison.
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