Saturday, September 16, 2006

EVERYTHING DEMOCRATS DO IS PATHETIC AND DOOMED TO FAILURE

So says (as usual) Adam Nagourney in the Sunday New York Times, citing (as usual) a GOP spin doctor:

A review of dozens of campaign commercials finds that Mr. Bush has become the star of the Democrats' advertisement war this fall.... Republican candidates are damned in the advertisements by the number of times they have voted with Mr. Bush in Congress.

...Ken Mehlman, the Republican national chairman, said the Republicans' own experience in politics suggested that running against someone who is not on the ballot is challenging. "The last time this kind of morph ad was tried was in '98 when we tried to nationalize the races against Clinton and it didn't work," he said....


Er, yeah -- and the midterm election cycle before that?

THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: ADVERTISING; Now Playing in Politics, Latest Techniques of Hollywood

It's not as if the Democrats were not having enough trouble with Republican efforts to paint their candidates as clones of President Clinton and to capitalize on the widespread unhappiness with his performance. Now, they are having to watch their rivals' advertising transform Democrats into Bill Clinton through a new video technique that was used in the movie "Terminator 2." The technique, known as morphing, merges two images slowly, giving the effect of a smooth metamorphosis from one image to the other. So what proved effective in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie is being tried in political commercials....

[New York Times,] October 29, 1994

I seem to recall the GOP did rather well that year.

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