Barack Obama’s right. The ad that Hillary Clinton released earlier yesterday is like other campaign ads that “play upon people’s fears and try to scare up votes”. This spot’s newer element, special to Hillary, is that it takes her substantial record of caring for children and says their lives, not merely their health plans, are in her hands.
To ominous music and the ringing of a telephone, various children sleep in their cozy beds as the male narrator warns: “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing. Something’s happened in the world. Your vote will decide who answers the call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military. Someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.” The voiceover drills in the first line, so that you’ll take it into the voting booth: “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?”
Fear-wise, the spot’s not as crude as Tom Tancredo’s Mexican-border-crossing terrorist bombing an American mall, but it is a lighter version of Daisy, Lyndon Johnson’s political scare spot in which a little girl counting petals on a daisy blends into the countdown of a nuclear explosion, which is often credited with nuking Barry Goldwater.
But my response to Hillary’s ad is, more than fear, irritation: Will somebody pick up the damn phone? It rings six times! The future Hillary White House won’t have an aide sitting by the proverbial red phone 24/7? Apparently not. After the incessant ringing, the camera shows Hillary on the phone — it’s 3 a.m. and she’s in pants-suit, necklace and lipstick.
Aside from taking forever to answer a world-saving or -ending phone call, Children, as the ad is called, has other sloppy planning. The mom who checks in on one of the sleeping kids is also fully dressed, shirt tucked into belted pants, at 3 a.m.
Apparently when the going gets tough in the Hillary campaign, the tough change clothes. In Hillary’s previous scary ad, Freefall, a guy who looks like he’s been pushed out of a plane and is falling to earth (symbolizing the economy in freefall) is saved at the last minute by a Hillary-supplied parachute. But wait — the saved guy is wearing completely different clothes from the pushed guy. Wait again — it’s a different guy. Either this was a really bad continuity snafu, or Hillary cruelly let the first man bite the dust.
The creepy and incompetent Freefall is in fact the ad over which top Hillary strategists Mark Penn and Mandy Gruenwald famously sniped at each other. From the Washington Post: “’Your ad doesn’t work,’ strategist Mark Penn yelled at ad-maker Mandy Grunwald. ‘The execution is all wrong,’ he said, according to the operatives. ‘Oh, it’s always the ad, never the message,’ Ms. Grunwald fired back, say the operatives. The clash got so heated that political director Guy Cecil left the room, saying, ‘I’m out of here.’”
Hillary’s 3 a.m. ad isn’t only off-kilter, it ain’t original. In January, a McCain ad, apparently made by a supporter, shows a “classified” bulletin coming in to the White House at “3 a.m. January 21, 2009.” It reads: “Foreign station chief reports security and theft of special weapon by unknown terriost (sic) group . ... Notify the president immediately.” Now at 3:03 a.m., we hear a phone ring (only three times thankfully), and right before a still shot of McCain, the words go up: “Who do you want to answer the phone?” Either the Hillary campaign plagiarized this video, or great fearmongering minds think alike. Long before any of these spots, during the 1984 primaries, establishment Democrat Walter Mondale ran this red-phone-ringing spot against fresh, younger-thinking Gary Hart, now an Obama supporter.
Of course, it’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask: Who do you trust to make important life and death decisions? But if viewers can get pass the fear evoked, they might decide that because Hillary and McCain have made such a large, wrong decision on Iraq, maybe we should let them catch more zzzz’s. That was more or less Obama’s response to Hillary’s ad:
“In fact, we have had a red phone moment. It was the decision to invade Iraq. Senator Clinton gave the wrong answer. George Bush gave the wrong answer. John McCain gave the wrong answer. I stood up and I said that a war in Iraq would be unwise. It cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars. I said that it would distract us from the real threat that we face, and that we should take the fight to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. That’s the judgment I made on the most important foreign policy decision of our generation.”
But those are, you might say, just words. It’s about time for the core rationale of his campaign to be made into an ad illustrating those words. Where’s the video of his famous 2002 speech that called the invasion to come “A dumb war. A rash war”?
