Political Ads

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

This ad asks the question that a lot of us would like to know the answer to.

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

On 7/2/2020 at 3:46 PM, Audrey2 said:

This just made me cry. It's so nice to see a candidate who is not afraid of children and doesn't make them cry, like Trump the scary clown.

I just cried too.  And now I want another baby so he can grow up to be that kid...how sweet was he!

[GreyhoundFan]

Not an ad, but an interesting analysis: "What the Lincoln Project Ad Makers Get About Voters (and What Dems Don’t)"

Spoiler

“100,000 Dead,” an ad from the anti-Trump super PAC known as The Lincoln Project, comes at you like a miniature horror film. It starts with a shot of seven white body bags, detailed enough that you can see the outline of limbs underneath, and the voice of President Donald Trump at a press briefing in February. The nation’s Covid-19 caseload will soon be “close to zero,” Trump says; his words repeat in an increasingly distorted voice, as the camera pulls back to reveal row upon row of body bags in the shape of an American flag. New words land on the screen with audible thumps: “100,000 dead Americans. One wrong president.” It ends with the faint sound of wind whistling, as if through a graveyard.

Down to the smallest detail, it’s a masterful nugget of compact filmmaking. And it helped draw attention to a renegade corps of Republican strategists, veterans of campaigns for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, who are applying their attack-ad skills to their own party’s president—and going for the kill shot, every time. “Mourning in America,” their ad released in May, starts with a pointed reference to the Ronald Reagan slogan, then blames Trump for the full range of post-Covid despair, using images of hospital hallways, decrepit buildings and an upside-down flag. (Facebook slapped the ad with a “partly false” warning label, since it assigns Trump all of the blame for relief bills that were passed by the vast majority of Democrats in Congress.) “Debt,” released in late June, starts off like a History Channel documentary about the sacrifices made during World War II, and ends with an image of a Greatest Generation member, hooked up to a ventilator.

Some of the ads are running on TV, on Fox News or in battleground states. Some are simply released online, at a rapid pace. Many are based on assumptions that may or may not turn out to be true: that swing voters will be as unforgiving as Democrats about Trump’s Covid response, for instance, or that they’ll be bothered any more by Trump’s coarse rhetoric than they were, or weren’t, four years ago. Still, the Lincoln Project is clearly getting under the skin of the president and his supporters. And the evidence is not just raging tweets; in one of those Washington funhouse mirror moments, the Trump-friendly super PAC Club for Growth just released an ad attacking the Lincoln Project founders as if they were candidates themselves.

How has one renegade super PAC managed to trigger Trump and his allies so thoroughly? Part of it is surely frustration that a group of Republicans would issue a full-throated endorsement of Joe Biden. Part of it is skill: the Lincoln Project ads are slick, quick and filled with damning quotes and unflattering photos. But part of it might just be that Republicans are better at this than Democrats. Trump may sense that these ads are especially dangerous because they pack an emotional punch, using imagery designed to provoke anxiety, anger and fear—aimed at the very voters who were driven to him by those same feelings in 2016. And history, even science, suggests that might in fact be the case—that Republicans have a knack for scaring the hell out of people, and that makes for some potent ads.

Not every Lincoln Project video peddles in fear. Some are traditional political ads, overenthusiastically produced and applied to issues that might irk the president: supporting Democrat Steve Bullock for U.S. Senate in Montana, attacking Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Some are 30-to-60-second versions of the kind of schoolyard taunting you might expect from Trump himself. In “Shrinking,” released after the president’s disappointing rally in Tulsa, a female voice mocks the size of the crowd: “You’ve probably heard this before, but it was smaller than we expected.”

The group’s most memorable ads, though, are the ones that are self-serious and brutal. Within days of news that Vladimir Putin paid the Taliban to target American soldiers, the Lincoln Project released two ads that hammer Trump as a lackey of foreign enemies, using language that, in another year, Republicans might have used to make Democrats look weak. “Betrayal” features Dan Barkhuff, a former Navy SEAL who declares that “any commander-in-chief with a spine would be stomping the living shit out of some Russians right now—diplomatically, economically, or, if necessary, with the sort of asymmetric warfare they’re using to send our kids home in body bags.” “Bounty” starts with images of flag-draped coffins and the sound of tapping drums, then pivots to a standard attack-ad trick: carefully-spliced clips of Trump and Putin at joint press conferences, the action drawn out so that every smile and handshake looks doubly sinister.

Stoking fear is a tried-and-true tactic of political advertising, stemming back to the Lyndon Johnson campaign’s 1964 anti-Barry Goldwater ad “Daisy.” But many of the most indelible ones have stemmed from the Republican camp, and over time, they’ve grown increasingly blunt. Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Bear” ad used a grizzly as metaphor for the Soviet nuclear threat: “Isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear—if there is a bear?” the voice over intoned. That ad inspired George W. Bush’s “Wolves” from 2004, which accused John Kerry of being soft on terrorism. George H.W. Bush’s infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad linked Michael Dukakis to a prisoner who committed brutal crimes on a weekend pass, flashing the words “Kidnapping,” “Stabbing,” and “Raping” on the screen. (The ad has since been scorned, not just for exploiting racial stereotypes, but also for paving the way for tough-on-crime bills that had lasting social repercussions.)

The secret of fearmongering is a willingness to go there, and that’s where the Republicans of the Lincoln Project might have an advantage over Trump’s left-leaning opponents. The group’s founders aren’t calibrating their ads around a Democratic base that mistrusts the military, delves into nuance, or shies away from causing offense. That leaves ample room for dog-whistle symbols that range from clichés to horror-movie tropes: One ad accuses Trump of being played by China, and ends with the image of the White House, the entire screen tinted red.

Research shows there’s a reason these ads could be effective with Republicans voters: Conservatives are an especially fear-prone group. In a 2008 paper in the journal Science, researchers subjected a group of adults with strong political beliefs to a set of startling noises and graphic images. Those with the strongest physical reactions were more likely to support capital punishment, defense spending and the war in Iraq. A 2011 paper in the journal Cell found a correlation between conservative leanings and the size of the right amygdala, the portion of the brain that processes emotions in response to fearful stimuli. In her book Irony and Outrage, University of Delaware professor Dannagal Young points out that liberals and conservatives respond differently to entertainment rhetoric: Liberals have a higher tolerance for open-ended ambiguity, while conservatives look for closure and want problems to be solved.

That research helps explain why some attack ads move the needle with the right populations—and why some, in retrospect, don’t. Take the Hillary Clinton campaign ad, “Mirrors,” which aired about a month before the 2016 election. Hailed, in certain circles, as an instant classic, it showed a series of young girls looking at their own reflections as Trump’s voice played in the background, saying things like, “I’d look her right in that fat ugly face of hers.” Mother Jones deemed the ad “powerful”; Bustle called it “brilliant.” But it didn’t convert the white suburban women Clinton’s advisers surely hoped to reach, because it not only preached to the choir, but spoke in the language of the choir. It was too subtle, Young might say, asking viewers to connect the dots, rather than hammering in a dramatic point. And it played to voters’ conscience and values—the kinds of things voters have to think about—rather than their raw emotions.

Trump’s ads, by comparison, have required little thought; the dots are pre-connected in thick Sharpie ink. His first 2016 ad, “Great Again,” touted his willingness to utter the words “RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM,” which the ad displayed in all caps over images of masked fighters and photos of the San Bernardino shooters. (The same ad pledged that Trump would “cut the head off ISIS.”) His campaign’s fear-stoking 2018 anti-immigration ad, featuring an illegal immigrant convicted of murder and caravan footage that evoked an invasion, was so incendiary that many networks, including Fox News, refused to run it.

The Lincoln Project, too, knows how to deliver an unsubtle message, and Trump has given them some useful raw material. Recent news footage makes him look weak and despondent—as when he descended from a helicopter after his Tulsa rally, a MAGA hat drooping from his hand like a dead trout. (The Lincoln Project’s ad sets the scene to “Jurassic Park” theme music, played badly on melodica.) The image of Trump holding up a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, intended as a metaphor of strength, now plays as shorthand for tone-deaf insincerity. Another ad, “#Trumpisnotwell,” mashes recent video of Trump gingerly walking down a West Point ramp with 2018 footage of him climbing onto Air Force One, with toilet paper apparently stuck to his shoe. In a line straight out of the Trump playbook, the ad suggests that the media is hiding information about his health. “The most powerful office in the world needs more than a weak, unfit, shaky president,” the narrator says, over echo-y tones of slasher-movie music.

It’s enough to inspire a presidential tweetstorm, or six. Lately, Trump and his surrogates have tried to fight back, calling the Lincoln Project founders “RINOS,” painting the group as elitists who think of Trump fans as deplorables. Trump has offered counter-images: This week, he retweeted a meme of himself in an Uncle Sam pose, pointing menacingly at the camera, between the words “In reality, they’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way.”

But the genius of the Lincoln Project ads is that they’re quite specifically after Trump, using his own favored tools of shamelessness and fearmongering, and turning them back on their source. Who knows? It could actually work.

 

[Dandruff]

9 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This ad asks the question that a lot of us would like to know the answer to.

 

The ad makes the point that the election will be determined by votes in six states.  I have no doubt that the Repug machine is focusing on how to maximize their votes there, so the Dems need to be focused and clever enough to outdo them in those six states.  I hope they can prioritize, in the midst of what I expect to be a profoundly "dirty" race, and get enough votes where they need them.  This, I believe, should have been at the beginning of the ad.  Expecting women vs. everyone to reconsider their past votes for Trump based on his behavior toward women was, IMO, a mistake.

All voters should be appalled by Trump's behavior toward women.  Why should men be excluded?  I think most men are perfectly capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong and sympathizing with women who have been victimized by men.  They all had mothers and many have sisters, wives, daughters, etc.  I remember how I felt when the McCain campaign chose Sarah Palin and some were suggesting that she should draw more of the female vote.  I felt like my intelligence was being put into question.  I feel like this ad was unintentionally, and somewhat indirectly, putting men's integrity into question and I wouldn't be surprised if some men felt the same way.

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, Dandruff said:

The ad makes the point that the election will be determined by votes in six states.  I have no doubt that the Repug machine is focusing on how to maximize their votes there, so the Dems need to be focused and clever enough to outdo them in those six states.  I hope they can prioritize, in the midst of what I expect to be a profoundly "dirty" race, and get enough votes where they need them.  This, I believe, should have been at the beginning of the ad.  Expecting women vs. everyone to reconsider their past votes for Trump based on his behavior toward women was, IMO, a mistake.

All voters should be appalled by Trump's behavior toward women.  Why should men be excluded?  I think most men are perfectly capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong and sympathizing with women who have been victimized by men.  They all had mothers and many have sisters, wives, daughters, etc.  I remember how I felt when the McCain campaign chose Sarah Palin and some were suggesting that she should draw more of the female vote.  I felt like my intelligence was being put into question.  I feel like this ad was unintentionally, and somewhat indirectly, putting men's integrity into question and I wouldn't be surprised if some men felt the same way.

You make some very valid points, that I completely agree with. It is precisely because we are constantly focussing on specific groups, like here, women (and even more specifically white women), or race, or heritage, or location, or whatever, that sets everyone apart from each other, that seemingly (sometimes unintentionally) disqualifies those not adressed. It is this that enables the us vs them attidudes that can lead to hate.

That said, I can understand adressing certain groups seperately when attempting to win their votes. The message in this ad is questionning why women would vote for a misogynist, against their own interests. It focusses on one aspect of why not to vote for him that mainly concerns women. Another ad might focus on POC, whilst pointing out Trump's obvious racism. That would not disqualify white voters, just adress those voters who are mainly (though not exclusively of course) concerned. The same for an ad aimed at military personnel or vets or any other group of voters pointing out Trump's total disregard for their very lives.

So I don't have a problem with ads aimed at specific groups per se; at least not when adressing group specific concerns.

[Dandruff]

12 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

So I don't have a problem with ads aimed at specific groups per se; at least not when adressing group specific concerns.

Agree...maybe they could fine-tune the ads to at least tacitly acknowledge, vs. seem to exclude, groups that aren't directly targeted in the ads.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I couldn't stand Reagan, but he could sell a speech:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Cartmann99]

*snorts*

 

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, Cartmann99 said:

*snorts*

 

One of the best ads I've seen yet - honest, brutal, and to the point.  This style, IMO, is how the Biden campaign should proceed when they're not demonstrating Biden's clear superiority for the job.

[WiseGirl]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

Jennifer Rubin's take:

The Supreme Court deals a blow to Trump’s delusions of untrammeled power

Quote

In a set of rulings — one testing whether Congress can obtain financial records of the president from third parties (Mazars USA, Deutsche Bank and Capital One) and the other whether the president is immune from state criminal investigation (in this case, a subpoena from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. on possible tax violations) while in office — the Supreme Court, with votes from both of President Trump’s appointees, effectively held the president is not above the law, dealing a blow to his delusions of absolute power.

In Vance, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — writing for a 7-to-2 majority — held that the president not only lacks immunity from a state criminal investigation but also enjoys no special, heightened standard of proof. Roberts recounted the history of the trial of Aaron Burr and then-Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling that President Thomas Jefferson was not immune from a subpoena for records. “In the two centuries since the Burr trial, successive Presidents have accepted Marshall’s ruling that the Chief Executive is subject to subpoena,” Roberts wrote. He also cited U.S. v. Nixon, which held that “the President’s ‘generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.’” While these cases involved federal subpoenas, Roberts held that state subpoenas are no different. Rejecting the notion of absolute immunity, Roberts found that “we cannot conclude that absolute immunity is necessary or appropriate under Article II or the Supremacy Clause.” (On this, he points out there was unanimous agreement in the court.)

As for the standard to be used, Roberts also found, “Requiring a state grand jury to meet a heightened standard of need would hobble the grand jury’s ability to acquire ‘all information that might possibly bear on its investigation.’” The lack of a heightened standard of proof leaves the president “the same protections available to every other citizen, including the right to challenge the subpoena on any grounds permitted by state law, which usually include bad faith and undue burden or breadth.” The president stands as every other citizens does — not above the law, but fully within its reach and the beneficiary of its protections. This is as strong a statement as “the president is not above the law” as one could hope for.

In an even more surprising ruling, also 7-2, Roberts wrote for the majority that the president is not shielded from congressional subpoenas directed at third parties for his documents. The case will be remanded to take into consideration four factors in determining whether to enforce the subpoenas. If the case does not involve executive deliberations, as was the case involving Trump’s financial dealings, the safeguards attendant to “candid, confidential deliberations within the Executive Branch” do not apply. “We decline to transplant that protection root and branch to cases involving nonprivileged, private information, which by definition does not implicate sensitive Executive Branch deliberations. The standards proposed by the President and the Solicitor General—if applied outside the context of privileged information—would risk seriously impeding Congress in carrying out its responsibilities.”

Moving on to the considerations that courts should undertake, Roberts finds:

First, courts should carefully assess whether the asserted legislative purpose warrants the significant step of involving the President and his papers. … Second, to narrow the scope of possible conflict between the branches, courts should insist on a subpoena no broader than reasonably necessary to support Congress’s legislative objective. … Third, courts should be attentive to the nature of the evidence offered by Congress to establish that a subpoena advances a valid legislative purpose. The more detailed and substantial the evidence of Congress’s legislative purpose, the better. … Fourth, courts should be careful to assess the burdens imposed on the President by a subpoena.

Roberts concludes that “all citizens” must cooperate with congressional demands for information needed for legislative action but that there are “special concerns regarding the separation of powers. The courts below did not take adequate account of those concerns.” The courts will consider the case “consistent with this opinion.”

“These opinions offer a resounding, definitive rejection of President Trump’s claims to monarchical prerogative. They affirm in the clearest possible terms that the president is not above the law — and that he is subject to state criminal subpoenas and congressional investigation under appropriate circumstances,” constitutional scholar Joshua Matz tells me. “To its credit, the Supreme Court does not throw the door wide open without any limits. It instead recognizes that principles of federalism and the separation of powers must structure the scope of any investigation concerning the president. But towering above those limitations is the court’s vital, timely recognition that we are a democracy and our president is no king.”

If one views this as a question of absolute power and the imperial pretensions of a president, the two cases represent a stunning rebuke to Trump. If one expected to get a peek at the documents before the election, the cases may disappoint. The latter, however, is far less critical than the former. We are a country of laws. The president is bound by them. Not a bad day’s work for the highest court nor for its reputation as an impartial umpire.

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]