UM’s Political Advertising Resource Center has started a health care reform ad project. It’s designed to offer an inventory of the ads aired during the health care reform debate, a news digest of articles about advertising in this debate, and eventually analyses of the ads from graduate students and faculty at UM. This is a project run by the Center for Political Communication & Civic Leadership.
Having survived the health care debates of the early nineties, I find the return of Harry & Louise perhaps the most interesting aspect of the current health care advertising battles. It’s an intriguing advertising approach, relying on political memory for success. I’m not convinced that most people, most voters remember Harry & Louise, or their position vis-a-vis the Clinton health care reform proposal. For those who lack the memory, don’t these new Harry & Louise ads seem odd–a couple of middle-aged folks randomly sitting around talking about health care?
I’m wondering if they might have wanted to draft a different ad–sort of a visually compelling “that was then, this is now” sort of ad that would do more to remind people of the 1993-1994 ads and how the situation has changed.
A former COMM 458 student (Emily Feldman) spotted this Web ad from the NJ campaigns. It’s another example of how campaigns really aren’t particularly original or sophisticated–it’s a rather clear play on the “movie trailer” genre with some obvious nods to Star Wars and horror film trailers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwfpSEaneY
It will be interesting to see, as the NJ and VA races heat up in the fall, whether there will be anything new or interesting in terms of ads. Certainly the primary ads in VA were fairly conventional.
Someone from Environment Maryland came by today to deliver the Legislative Scorecard for the 2009 MD legislative session. Happily, the scorecard revealed that all of our legislators from the Takoma Park area score quite well on environmental matters. But that’s not really surprising.
As I’ve noted, I participated in a two-day workshop on integrating sustainability in the college/university curriculum–The Chesapeake Project. It was a great workshop, sponsored by the Office of Sustainability at UM and organized very successfully by Mark Stewart from that office. My proposal was to redo the curriculum of my political advertising class to focus on how the 2009 campaign for governor in Virginia and the 2010 campaigns in Maryland discuss the environment and sustainability, with a specific focus on how the candidates deal with Chesapeake Bay preservation/restoration issues.
During the workshop, I came across a fascinating document from SustainCommWorld that traced the carbon footprint of the political ads in 2008. It’s pretty dramatic. You can read it here: 2008 Political Ads Carbon Footprint.
A couple of weeks ago, I was a guest on Dan Rodricks Midday show on WYPR from Baltimore–the NPR affiliate. The subject was President Obama’s flip-flopping on several important issues, including withholding the release of prisoner abuse photographs, holding back on aggressively pursuing gay and lesbian rights, etc. It was an interesting discussion, that also featured Herb Smith, a professor at McDaniel College. The show aired on May 28, and you can listen to it here.
Both Herb and I concluded that consistency in political leadership is not all it’s cracked up to be, and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have a president who changes his (or her) mind and who adapts to changing conditions. I was particularly amused by a caller who complained that Obama was not pursuing a single-payer health care system. This caller had worked on the campaign, going door to door for Obama, and yet couldn’t understand why the president, now, was abandoning single-payer. Of course, Obama NEVER supported a single-payer system, except for that one clip that emerged from some forum during that campaign that showed a young Obama saying that such a system would be good in an ideal world.
I thought this particular caller was a fascinating example of the disappointments of some on the left who projected onto Obama (with no small amount of encouragement from the candidate and his campaign) all their hopes and dreams for a new great society, only to have their hopes dashed when they realize that he’s not all he’s cracked up to be in terms of lefty policies. At the same time, they should also realize that he never was all that lefty during the campaign, magnificently carving out a moderate range of policy positions even against a profoundly liberal, if somewhat limited by time, voting record in the Senate.
The same day at the WYPR interview, I was also quoted in a Matt Kelley story in USA Today about Jeff Sessions, the new ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee who was rejected for a federal judgeship by that same committee a few decades ago. The story discusses Sessions’ role in the Sotomayor confirmation. You can read it here.
Interesting result from yesterday’s VA Democratic gubernatorial primary–Clintonista Terry McAuliffe lost to R. Creigh Deeds, a downstater from Bath County who was a long-time state legislator and failed candidate for Attorney General in 2005.
Not a lot of advertising in the DC area in this election. McAuliffe was up with some fairly standard ads about his plans for the Commonwealth, but they were largely unremarkable. Deeds went up with ads touting his coveted Washington Post endorsement–they were neat ads, but said little besides the fact that he was endorsed.
Of particular disappointment was each candidate’s unwillingness to speak seriously about the Chesapeake Bay and environmental issues. I’ve scoured their ads and Web sites in preparation for a class on sustainability and political campaigns in the ‘09 Virginia and ‘10 Maryland elections (as part of the Chesapeake Project), and there are only occasional mentions of green jobs and the need for more technology to preserve the environment. The only candidate to seriously address the need to restore the Bay was Brian Moran, and he came in third, well behind Deeds.
