3rd district Democratic candidate Ashwin Madia is hitting the airwaves again this week with a new ad, entitled "Discipline."
According to the campaign release accompanying the ad,
[W]ith greater teamwork and discipline in Congress, we could achieve a balanced budget and implement strong oversight of our financial markets to get our economy back on track. Madia points out the fallacy in our spending $10 billion a month in Iraq when that country has a $79 billion surplus.
Madia stated, "With the worsening of this economic crisis, it is time to focus on the issues that directly impact the residents of the Third District. Instead of petty political attacks, candidates for Congress should offer voters their specific ideas about how they plan to get our economy back on track. I am proud my campaign is offering yet another positive message of real solutions to the very serious challenges facing our country."
Al Franken's new TV ad hits ground today with an unspecified media buy. Here's the ad:
It's a good ad -- it's simple, it puts Al in serious but personable shoes, and it connects gas prices to a heretofore untouched issue, that of the revolving door between Congress and special interest lobbying.
But...
It's not a great ad, because of how it frames the gas price issue. Republican candidates like Norm Coleman are offering a really, really bad solution to the gas price issue: MORE DRILLING! ON LAND! AT SEA! EVERYWHERE! That solution likely won't work in the long run -- as has been noted recently in many, many places, the U.S. simply does not have the domestic capacity to jack up supply to meet rising demand.
So the Republicans have a bad solution. What's the Democratic solution?
And that's what's missing from this ad and others like it from candidates around the country right now -- there's no solution yet, just a rehashing of the issue to (hopefully) remind voters of who was in charge when these problems got bad (hint: Republicans). The Democrats' solution needs to be a comprehensive one: take away the tax breaks that are making the oil companies rich beyond compare, and put that money into clean energy solutions and a massive rebuild of our national infrastructure, including mass transit, highways, bridges, the whole thing. Invest in ways to actually lower our demand for oil instead of haplessly trying to increase supply in the face of Peak Oil. Provide relief for those who are most affected by these price spikes but are unable ("unwilling" does not qualify, Escalade drivers) to control their personal demand for oil.
Unfortunately, birdshot solutions like that are more difficult to explain than "Let's drill!" So the default advertising position for Democratic candidates right now is to get voters angry, and to hope they're angrier at Republicans than at their Democratic opponents for the problems we now face. As a challenger to a rubber-stamp Republican like Norm Coleman, Franken may be able to pull it off. But that doesn't mean this ad is the best way to go about getting the job done or advocating for the right solutions once he goes to Washington.
So the ad is good for its own sake, and only decent for the sake of America's future. YMMV.
Bloggers say the Coleman campaign was making the Colemans' relationship appear to be something it isn't. The Coleman campaign moved quickly to prove the bloggers wrong.
The campaign allowed outtakes of the commercial to be released. The outtakes clearly show Laurie Coleman was there for the filming. But in cyberspace the debate rages on.
"By putting Laurie Coleman in this ad, the Coleman campaign has invited scrutiny on an issue they thought was long forgotten," said Professor Larry Jacobs of the Humphrey Institute. [Emphasis added]
I would add a slight correction to Murphy's coverage, however: the debate that's raging isn't about the production of the ad anymore (although that was fun). The debate is over the ad's content -- namely, the truthiness of the happy-couple image it portrays.
Laurie Coleman is an actress, model and entrepreneur whose career has led to her spend time out of state.
"It is not OK in our book to attack the senator's wife," said Erin Rath of the Coleman campaign.
Campaign staffers are indignant over any suggestion that Laurie Coleman is anything but a devoted wife and mother who juggles career, husband and two grown kids.
I have to laugh whenever I read the words "campaign staffers are indignant." I would challenge the Coleman campaign to show where anything we bloggers have asked, said, or explicitly implied could reasonably (read: by someone other than the Coleman campaign and its bought-and-paid-for minions) be considered an attack against Mrs. Coleman. Quite the contrary -- whatever arrangements she has to make her marriage and career function are perfectly okay. Let's just make sure Minnesota is getting an accurate picture of those arrangements if they are to be used in campaign advertising.
Well, it's Monday, now two days since I suggested that Norm Coleman should sever ties with the staffers who wasted donors' money and their time attacking bloggers late last week. No matter. The ad isn't what's important -- it's the content of the ad we need to be discussing this week.
What's the issue with the content of the controversial ad? Norm Coleman's image as a happily married man, emphasized at numerous times during the ad. Norm happily complies with his wife's lovingly given command to take out the trash (an old gimmick that was used by Chris Gabrieli in his unsuccessful bid for Governor in Massachusetts in 2006), the zoomed-in shot of a wedding ring, etc.
Google Laurie Coleman's name and you get a hodge-podge of results: political sites on both sides of aisle lauding her hotness, some actor bios, some BLO-N-GO information and articles, and more than a few mentions of her splitting time between Los Angeles, Minnesota, and Washington D.C. The question raised by last week's ad snafu is this: how much time is she spending in each place? Is she really the dutiful yet assertive wife depicted in the strangely-produced ad, or is that image merely a politically convenient construct?
Given the viciousness with which the Coleman campaign fought back against our questions last week, one has to wonder whether there's more here than meets a cursory glance.
I would have posted this last night, but we lost power in the brief wind storm and I was given a few extra hours to mull over what I wanted to say. Here goes.
Q: How do you know when a Republican incumbent's campaign is knee-deep in trouble?
A: When they throw together a press release complete with a make-fun-of-the-issue video to defuse the problem on a Friday afternoon and post it to the front page of their website.
Oh, and attack bloggers too. Personally.
The Coleman campaign -- not one of its allies in the conservative blogs, not a volunteer, no, the Norm Coleman for United States Senate campaign, paid for a video of someone wearing an Al Franken mask poking fun at the issue of their strange-looking ad including Laurie Coleman -- and spent time and effort writing a sarcastic campaign-blog post insulting the integrity and commentary of those of us who dared to question their video production capabilities.
I suppose I should be honored, in a sense: I've joined the club populated by those who have been personally attacked by Sen. Norm Coleman. I would expect this kind of conduct from some in the blogosphere, that great unwashed commentariat, but from a campaign fighting to re-elect a United States Senator?
Really? I've been surprised at the course of this campaign at times, but this really jumps the shark.
Senator Coleman: you really should fire or request the immediate resignation of anyone on your campaign that had anything to do with the production, posting, or approval of this video and post. Just let them go. These people are doing you a disservice, and are undeserving of further employment by your campaign. Minnesota deserves better than these personal, sarcastic attacks right out of John Kline's playbook.
I understand that the campaign has published outtakes from the shoot -- that's a good thing. I'm glad to see it's a matter of the campaign having hired videographers who simply produced a weird-looking and poorly-done ad spot in an effort to highlight the Senator's family-values bona fides.
However, now that it's fair to discuss Sen. Coleman's relationship with his wife, let's have that discussion: is the image presented in the ad a fair one? A realistic one? A truthful one?
How much time do the Colemans spend in the same state, on average?
This, dear readers, is the real issue at hand: is Norm Coleman presenting false images to the voters of Minnesota? That's what we should be discussing instead of watching a campaign for the United States Senate campaign attack people whose names aren't on the ballot.
And of course, this entire discussion is distracting us from this:
This is weird. Just weird. But...well, not that weird, considering the odd domestic situation rumored to be the case for Norm Coleman and his wife.
Others are wondering whether Laurie Coleman was greenscreened into this ad, which is right in line with Mark Kennedy's 2006 "a little too close" ad, designed to show off a human side of the candidate with a little humor. But look at this angle:
Lighting and reflections are one issue, but they were issues when we landed on the moon too. However, check out the angle in that shot -- it looks like Mrs. Coleman is either embedded into the counter, or wasn't actually in this shot, especially when you consider that the height difference between the two isn't that big:
Contrary to what certain Republican mouthpieces would tell you, this isn't an attack on his family, especially with an ad -- quite the contrary, this is the Coleman campaign using Coleman's family to appeal to family-values voters across Minnesota. Given the persistent rumors about Sen. Coleman's domestic situation, however, I think it's reasonable to ask if the campaign is giving Minnesotans a false impression of Coleman's private life for the sake of electoral gain.
Do you think that's possible?
On a substantive note -- yes, Coleman campaign, keep saying things like "he's in the pocket of big oil." I'm sure that won't backfire on you, despite the context.
