Friday, January 30, 2004

Ellisblog to the Rescue!

Well, we're in the stretch of the February 3rd primaries and caucuses and still not a negative ad to be had. Ellisblog is miffed. Work with me here, people! You're not going to win if you don't take the front-runner down a peg or three. If you let him win, he will win.

"We can't," say the political consultants to those who seek to upend Senator Kerry. "It boomeranged on Gephardt and Dean in Iowa! And our guy has to appear in the ad! We don't know what to do!"

Please. Get in the game. How do you go negative and negate backlash? Humor! Make 'em laugh! Don't tell me you can't make a funny ad out of John Kerry's 42 positions on the War in Iraq! Don't tell me you can't get a few knowing chuckles out of the "Gulfstream populist." It's not that hard!

One striking feature of this year's presidential camapign has been the uniformly dreadful content of the television and radio advertising. Talk about fighting the last war. The scripts are from campaigns waged two and four and six years ago. It's not that they're similar, it's that they're the exact same scripts. The RNC scripts appear to be from Arthur Finkelstein's reject file.

Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?