The campaign industrial complex strikes again
“I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.”
— Nationally prominent Republican officialFrom “Crashing the Gate,” by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (2006)
Until he lost, I had not seen any of Jon Ossoff’s campaign ads when he ran for GA-6 in 2017. When finally I did, I sensed the sleep-inducing, dead hand of the campaign industrial complex.
Here are just two:
Makes you want to run right out and hire a nice, conservative accountant, doesn’t it?
Ossoff lost in 2017, but not the consultants who helped spend $23 million of his donors’ money on a U.S. House race. After some lessons learned and with inadvertent help from Donald Trump, Sen. Jon Ossoff got a second chance in 2021. His consultants likely got more work.
I don’t know if Ossoff was using a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee-approved ad shop. But take their money and you normally have to use their pet vendors … even if they suck. His 2017 ads had that familiar, take-no-chances, cookie-cutter feel.
The ads above come to mind because this week the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in North Carolina released her first TV ad.
My heart sank into my shoes. I need that Senate seat. Your, dear reader, need that Senate seat. Cheri Beasley needs to do better.
A friend who ran for Congress supported by DCCC money ran a similar template for her first ad. A bit more animated, but it started exactly like Beasley’s: driving her car to show how just-like-you she is. My friend lost her 2004 race. But the “27B/6 — Candidate Intro” template survives in the political catalog to be sold by campaign professionals in 2022. This time to Cheri Beasley.
Beasley brought in decent but unremarkable money through the end of March: $8.6 million. But her campaign has been unremarkable as well. She’s won statewide as a judicial candidate twice before and lost her state supreme court seat by 401 votes in 2020, the Covid election. Running for Senate after running as a judge is a different skill set. Republicans will be merciless whatever safe, inoffensive campaign advisers insist she runs. Beasley’s first ad shows she’s not being well served by the campaign industrial complex, whether it hails from Washington, D.C. or Raleigh.
Candidates running these cookie-cutter ads do sometimes win. But safe will not cut it in 2022.
See, whatever you do, run against the government you want to administer. Reassure voters you won’t be partisan. You’re a different kind of politician. You’ll find common ground with the arsonists trying to burn down American democracy. Open your wallets now, won’t you?
She’s a mom (below). A mom who flies helicopters. And she wants you to know she, too, dislikes partisan politics, so she doesn’t want you to know she’s a Democrat. Because in 2022 people might think she’s a helicopter-flying pedophile who takes children for “rides.”
These lame efforts sparked this ad parody five years ago.
Whatever you do, DO NOT EVER repeat back (reinforce) your opponents’ smears, “I’m not a witch” style. If you’re a Republican in 2010:
Or a Democrat in 2018:
The Russ Feingold ad below by a shop in Milwaukee in 2004 is still a classic that plays against formula. But don’t expect anything like it from D.C. consultants from the campaign industrial complex.
Any number of Hollywood writers (and probably a few from Madison Avenue) itch to help Democratic candidates tell eye-catching, gripping stories for selling themselves to voters. But they are not part of the old-boy network that, win or lose, earns its living making sleep-inducing retreads like those above. Paid for by the candidate’s committee with your donations.
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