I haven't spent much time in Coulda Shoulda Woulda Land since the election because there's not much point. In a year with everything against him, John McCain did incredibly well (and had a real chance to win until the financial meltdown). But, as most conservatives were well aware, there were plenty of ads that should have been run but were not because everything (skinny, community organizer, Jeremiah Wright, celebrity) was racism.
What if the McCain campaign had run ads using footage of Barack Obama dancing with Ellen DeGeneres to show his coziness with celebrity? Or followed up on its Paris Hilton ad with others featuring Donald Trump and Jessica Simpson? All of that was on the drawing board of Fred Davis III, the advertising whiz that John McCain has used for almost all of his campaign media and one of the most talented conservative political operatives in America...
"My favorite ad of the campaign was as simple as it could be," Davis said. "And it started out something like, 'Long before the world knew of John McCain or Barack Obama, one of them spent five years in a hellhole because he refused early release to honor his fellow prisoners, while the other one wouldn't walk out of a church after 20 years of the guy spewing hatred towards America.' And the last line was, 'Character matters, especially when no one is listening.' " The ad never ran, however, because McCain ruled the topic of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the preacher of Obama's Chicago church, out of bounds shortly after he locked up the Republican nomination.
McCain's campaign was called racist from the get-go and don't think Obama didn't use fears of racism throughout his campaign, both against Hillary Clinton and John McCain. In fact, if times get tough, we'll be hearing that criticism of Obama as president is racism.
Davis says that concern about race played a major role in the entire aesthetic of McCain's ads. The photographs of Obama that the ads used, for instance, which often showed Obama elongated and smiling, were carefully selected, he recalls. "We chose them with only one thing in mind, and that is to not make them bad pictures because bad pictures would be seen as racist," Davis says. "How many shots in their ads did they use a John McCain [photo] looking decent and smiling?" He says the campaign also agonized over the music in the ads, paying special care not to play drum-heavy tracks that could be seen as an African tribal reference. "We were held to a totally different standard," he says.
The Affirmative Action candidate was held to a different standard. Will the Affirmative Action president be held to a different standard, as well?
|