YouTube and news media blogs have made it possible for us to watch political ads in primary states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina. An added advantage: We're not assaulted by them when we're watching TV. We can link to them when we want to and ignore them when we don't.
(Tangent: What are the implications of this feature of the Internet for advertising in general, which historically has relied on reaching captive audiences?)
A number of ads run by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the run-up to Tuesday's Democratic primary in Pennsylvania are linked to two items posted to the CBS blog "Campaign '08 Horserace." It's not my favorite blog. (That honor goes to "The Swamp" put up by The Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau.) But it's got a lot of recent ads linked to it. We'll watch several of them.
If we have time, we'll listen to an audio clip of New Yorker analysts Hendrik Hertzberg and Ryan Lizza, questioned by editor Dorothy Wickenden, discussing McCarthyism in the Philadelphia debate. It's under the headline "The Campaign TRAIL" on the upper left of The New Yorker's home page. We'll definitely read the article "Bitter Patter" on the Philadelphia debate, which he describes as "a two-hour televised smackdown in Philadelphia between the two remaining Democratic candidate for President, which might have been billed as the Élite Treat v. th Boilermaker Belle." Subtle, it's not. Shrewd and incisive, it is.
I'm not sure about everyone else, but between our advertising class and this one, I am about to go crazy looking at all these ads. Anyway, the first couple of commercials weren't bad at all. They simply explained how each candidate felt about different issues without bashing the other candidate. The rest were nothing but bashing. To go along with what we were talking about in class, talking bad about the other candidate, does nothing but hurt your chance. One thing I found interesting, each candidate's ads matched. If one put out an ad opposing a specific topic, the other answered back with a very similar ad instead of just being the bigger person.
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