JOE BIDEN SPEAKS….Here’s something interesting. A couple of days ago I was noodling, as we political junkies are wont to do, about what kind of ads Barack Obama ought to be running. I didn’t bother posting about it, though, because we amateurs are forever thinking we have brilliant ideas along these lines and we amateurs are almost always wrong.
So imagine my surprise when I saw my imaginary ad basically being narrated by Joe Biden in a speech this morning at St. Clair Shores, Michigan:
Eight years ago, a man ran for President who claimed he was different, not a typical Republican. He called himself a reformer. He admitted that his Party, the Republican Party, had been wrong about things from time to time. He promised to work with Democrats and said he’d been doing that for a long time.
That candidate was George W. Bush. Remember that? Remember the promise to reach across the aisle? To change the tone? To restore honor and dignity to the White House?
….Eight years later, we have another Republican nominee who’s telling us the exact same thing: This time it will be different, it really will. This time he’s going to put country before party, to change the tone, reach across the aisle, change the Republican Party, change the way Washington works.
We’ve seen this movie before, folks. But as everyone knows, the sequel is always worse than the original.
The fact that this approach seems effective to me is probably a bad sign. Still: this approach seems effective to me. Basically, you run an ad that uses lots of hot button imagery to plausibly pin the blame for some problem or another (economic meltdown, Jack Abramoff, Katrina, our inability to capture Osama bin Laden, etc.) on “the usual Republican approach” or some such, and then close with, “Now John McCain is running for president. He says he’s a different kind of Republican. Do you believe him?” Add creepy music, grainy black-and-white images, or whatever else the current state of the art in attack ads calls for, and you’re off to the races.
Eh. Probably wouldn’t focus group well or something, I suppose, and besides, it might piss off too many moderate Republicans who might otherwise vote for Obama. Plus it’s pretty ordinary stuff that wouldn’t generate any media outrage. In the end, who knows? We all think we’re marketing geniuses, don’t we?
