Pine Belt Progressive

h/t WriteChic

That’s a lot of money for the NRCC to be putting into the First District of Mississippi — especially for ads of such poor production quality. It’s always difficult to tell how ads will be received, but in the one above, I think people are going to find the narrator condescending . The animation looks like it was done with PowerPoint.

“Groovy” is just silly. It’s a sign that whoever produced the ad believes Mississippians are still living in the 1980s. Using the hippie stereotype as a smear just doesn’t have the same effect it did 25 years ago, and there are going to be a lot of voters participating in this election who simply don’t have the emotional baggage from the Vietnam Era that’s required to make it work. “That dog won’t hunt” makes it even more obvious that the genius behind this ad thinks we’re all smoking corncob pipes and have cotton growing up to the edge of our porches.

Having donated money to John Kerry may be a good thing for Childers at this point. Kerry ran against Bush in 2004. To a lot of people, that’s all that matters, and it’s a plus. If this ad has any positive effect for Republicans at all, it’s going to come from stirring up some homophobic bigots who might otherwise stay home. I think that’s what the mention of S.F. and having Pelosi’s name in pink are really about.

This one, from the Davis campaign, is a bit more dangerous and a lot more dishonest.

It’s been thoroughly deconstructed elsewhere by now. Rev. Wright’ statement is being distorted here, and Obama wasn’t ridiculing rural people with his statement about guns and religion. This one could do some damage, though. It’s no secret that we still have lots of racism in Mississippi. However, it seems to me that the ad is preaching to the choir and could backfire. I think more people than you would expect are going to say the same thing about Rev. Wright’s speech that Buelahman said the other day in this post, which includes several minutes of video that helps to put Rev. Wright’s speech into its proper context.

The ad from the Davis campaign is, I think, designed to incite the base and get some people who would otherwise stay home to turn out. The problem I see with it is that it’s probably going to turn some people off, too. It’s fairly well-accepted that negative advertising reduces turnout in general more often than not. Since it tends to hurt the target’s turnout more than the sponsor’s, and since high turnout so often favors Democrats, I think the GOP strategy here is to depress turnout as much for possible and hope for the best.

It’s significant that the word “Republican” isn’t mentioned anywhere in the ad. That’s because the Republican brand is pretty much dead, at least for this election cycle. If someone in the Childers campaign asked for my advice, I’d tell them to brand Davis as a big-money, pro-war Republican. One who doesn’t want us to have jobs or our children to have health insurance. Just like Bush and McCain. They should also do everything possible to question his credibility as a conservative.

To me, these ads make Davis seem desperate. As nervous as that second ad makes me, I’m glad the NRCC is spending this kind of money here, and I hope it turns out to be a waste of resources for them.

Jeff Walters has a roundup on the MS-01 race over at the excellent Cotton Mouth, including a link to a post that discusses the FEC filing that the dollar figure comes from.

Will Bardwell has invented a fun new game called “Childers said Nothing.”