The latest candidate ads are inhuman. That is, they are metaphors using animal images: Bush's latest ad shows wolves silently hunting in a forest and decries Kerry's vote to slash intel funding after 9-11-01; Kerry's shows an eagle and ostrich -- the eagle soaring high seeing the vista, the ostrich with its head in the sand.
Kerry's ad is too easily reversible -- the implication they want you to believe is that Kerry is seeing the big picture, Bush has his head in the sand. Cute, but Kerry had his head in the sand for the whole Cold War, the whole Clinton Presidency and even today wants to treat terrorism as a law enforcement/nuisance issue. So the ad's effectiveness is weak. Quite honestly, the few Kerry and leftist 527 ads I've seen (non-swing state voter) have generally been pretty poor.
Bush's ad has some right-wingers salivating at its potentially devastating impact because they harken back to the bear-in-the-woods ad from 1984 that supposedly worked so well for Reagan. That's dopey -- I don't think that 1984 nostalgia will work because too few people will remember it, especially not voters aged 18-37 who couldn't vote in '84. And I agree with Jonah Goldberg that sharks in the water (without lasers) would have been better than wolves -- the big greys in the ad look healthy and fluffy (not scraggly and feral) so they're like oversized huskies and seem like big ole doggies. Voters in states threatened by wolves (like ranchers in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas) are breaking 60-35 for Bush anyway. Hopefully the Kerry-voted-to-defenestrate-our-intelligence line will work better than the imagery.
No comments:
Post a Comment