Selling the candidate

In the spirit of digression and disjuncture which seems to characterize my posts today, I wish to comment on some of the ads I've seen in these final days of the campaign. Last week I saw one for Kerry that I thought absolutely brilliant. It was not an ad designed by the Kerry campaign; it was designed by Rob Reiner for MoveOn, and it is perhaps the best ad this season. You can download the movie and watch it at Move On.org, but you'll have to register first with an email address. I suggest using a junk email address, a free yahoo! account, to avoid the inevitable spam. Reiner intercuts scenes of President Bush struggling to identify a mistake his adminstration has made with the traditional Democrat mantra of lost jobs, Iraq war dead, and other mistakes. From what I understand, the ad is only showing in Maryland and D.C. right now. I hope it moves into battleground states in the coming week. I think it would be especially effective in Ohio.

The Bush campaign also has a very good ad titled simply Wolves. It depicts terrorists as wolves lying in wait to attack a weakened America. I think the ad is unfair to wolves, since killing is how wolves live; they are not evil creatures. In fact they have a nobiliy about them, if you think about it. I like wolves because rather than being independent, they are creatures of the pack, dependent upon each other, upon community, for survival. However, I understand the power of the Bush ad. No doubt it also is coded to speak to evangelicals, as well, because of the Biblical symbology behind the wolf as a creature that preys on the weak and the stray. And if the terrorists are the wolves, who then is the Good Shepherd?

Other Bush campaign ads are less effective, at least to my mind. I am turned off by the maudlin emotion on display in the whole Ashley campaign, which features a teary eyed Bush looking deeply into the camera while he hugs a little girl named Ashley, who lost her mother in the Trade Center attacks. "He just wants to keep me safe," the girl says in her sooundbite from the advertisement. No, Dear, he just wants to get reelected.

I suppose it is how Bush is looking into the camera that overpowers the effectiveness of the advertisement. It renders the moment inauthentic, though I suppose not everyone has that reaction. Bush looks as if he is reproving us for not believing in him more deeply, as if he is asking, "How could you vote against me? Look how red my eyes are from weeping for this little girl."

Finally, I saw the most recent Swift boat advertisement ("neither swift, nor truthful," as Jon Stewart has described the group as a whole). I saw the They Served ad one can view on the website. I had the thought, watching it, that if one did not know the Swiftees were anti-Kerry, one might think the ad is pro-Kerry. The camera pans across a lineup of geezers as the narrator intones, "They served their country with courage and distinction.  They’re the men who served with John Kerry in Vietnam." And so on. One keeps expecting the narrator to say they are endorsing Kerry for President. About halfway through, he does speak the rather syntactically confusing line, "[They were] tortured for refusing to confess what John Kerry accused them of. . . of being war criminals." Other than that, the ad seems pretty innocuous, even inexpertly put together to me.

Time is moving on, now. Hard to say what another week will hold, but I still have high hopes that Kerry will win. One thing Bush has working in his favor, however, is the inconstancy factor. Or perhaps from his point of view, it is a constancy factor, since Americans are traditionally, perhaps consitutionally unwilling to "change horses in midstream," in clichéd political parlance. From my perspective it is inconstancy, since no doubt people who see problems with the Bush administration and do not dislike Kerry—who perhaps even say they intend to vote for him—will have second thoughts in the poll booth itself. This is the segment of the population the Ashley ads are meant to appeal to, the people who say at the last minute, "Well, he's such a nice guy, and I really like him; he is caring. I think I'll give him another chance." Call it 'battered wife syndrome' if you will. A few tears, a hug (but no real apologies), and the guy is back in her good graces again, for a little while. Long enough.