I know I keep predicting the end of the age of Rove and I keep being wrong. But seriously, McCain's new crop of ads is...well...pathetic.
Last night we went to his
website and watched the "Celebrity" ad. Go have a look and then come back and tell me how exactly this is going to help McCain. I mean, I think I can figure out the strategy. It's the execution that's so mindbogglingly ineffective.
It was one of Rove's favorite axioms that you attack the candidate on his strengths. Kerry's strength was his war record; ergo, the Swift Boat Veterans For Making Shit Up attacked his war record. Obama's strength is his charisma, magnetism, popularity, "it" factor, whatever you want to call it. So it's natural that they would do an ad attacking his popularity. Comparing him to two relatively young blonde airheads who are also famous for being publicly dysfunctional and debauched is crude, but it could be effective.
What makes NO sense is including all those crowd shots of Obama addressing huge numbers of people who are chanting his name in unison. If you want to give the makers of this ad enough credit for cunning, the rationale for including those shots is basically that they are trying to make him look like a scary Black demagogue who's going to lead his fanatical followers to power on the back of the poor downtrodden white man--sort of a cross between Malcom X and Hitler. If that indeed was the rationale, maybe they shouldn't have used footage from Obama's recent European tour, where the crowd is predominantly white. Also, I know they were maybe trying for a Triumph of the Will type effect, but still, they probably shouldn't have used the audio of the enthusiastic chanting crowd. Because the text keeps telling you all about the higher taxes and so on that Obama will visit upon us, but the viewer is going, "Taxes? What? Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome all these people think your opponent is."
So the message is, "Their candidate is handsome, charismatic, and able to inspire dedication and passion in hordes of people. But you don't want THAT, do you? Vote McCain 2008: Because after all, it's not a popularity contest."
Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, the "Love" ad, which is actually a replacement of a different "Love" ad which was taken down as a result of public criticism, tries to put McCain in a positive light by pointing out that in 1964, while a load of decadent hippie hedonists were getting high and getting laid in sunny California, McCain was serving in the US military, getting himself shot down, imprisoned, and so on. The strategy here actually makes a lot more sense. But there's one problem: the ad is so structured as to continually remind viewers of how old he is. They start with some footage of his release, at which point he was a fairly charming and relatively good looking guy, and then make the mistake of showing a bunch of clips of his subsequent career, in which he gets older and older and older. It's startling how much more frail McCain looks in the final shot than he did even 10-15 years ago. And of course that's the shot they have to end with. The overall effect is sort of like that Star Trek episode where Kirk and McCoy encounter some sort of radiation which causes super-accelerated aging, and spend the rest of the episode getting older, uglier, and crankier. Alas, McCain's people do not have at their disposal whatever magical antidote it is that Spock comes up with.
Maybe these guys have gone back to the Rovian well once too often.
Let us hope,
The Plaid Adder
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