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October 27, 2004
John Kerry and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge
I got home last night around the middle of the eighth inning of the world series game and turn on the tv so I could watch the last few innings of the game. During the commercials I started flipping in between the game and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, the Japanese show where they torture people through dangerous stunts. I am watching this and all of a sudden a John Kerry commercial comes on that says that George Bush has personally shipped 10 million jobs over seas or something like that. There has to be some irony in the fact that I am watching an imported television show (one that could have been made by American workers dammit!) while John Kerry complains about the global economy.
It is sometimes frustrating that I live in Texas, a very red state, and my vote will not have much effect on the election. On the other hand this is the first Kerry commercial I have seen all year. And I have only seen about three or four Bush commercials. I suspect that I would be subjected to a lot more if I lived in a state like Ohio, where my vote would have counted more. I have hated political commercials since I had to watch Diane Feinstein talk about the death of the mayor of San Francisco over and over again. Everybody who lived in California when Feinstein was running for statewide office around fifteen years ago (and maybe to this day) was subjected to these endlessly repeating commercials about how the mayor of San Francisco had been shot and because of this for some reason we should vote for Feinstein. Ever since then I have wondered why political commercials suck so much. Without knowing anything about Feinstein I decided never to vote for her because I could not watch TV without being annoyed by her disturbing commercial.
How come they can make entertaining commercials for so many other crappy products, but for something as important as a political race they seem to go low budget and annoying? I hardly ever hate beer or car commercials. I have never seen a political ad that made me vote for a candidate or issue, but besides the Feinstein add there have been some that caused me to vote against the candidate running the add. The other one like this I remember was an Ed Garza (current mayor of San Antonio) negative ad from about four years ago that accused his opponent of running a negative ad campaign. I chose to vote against Garza as soon as the ad was done because if running a negative ad was as bad as Garza was claiming, then I should vote against Garza who I knew had run a negative ad, while I did not know that for sure about his opponent.
Posted by Pete at October 27, 2004 08:32 AM
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