Posted on 11/25/2008 5:25:41 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
What if the McCain campaign had run ads using footage of Barack Obama dancing with Ellen DeGeneres to show his coziness with celebrity? Or followed up on its Paris Hilton ad with others featuring Donald Trump and Jessica Simpson? All of that was on the drawing board of Fred Davis III, the advertising whiz that John McCain has used for almost all of his campaign media and one of the most talented conservative political operatives in America. Oh yes, he also had an Internet ad up his sleeve that would attack Obama's celebrity by associating him with Oprah. But in the end, he scotched that one. "We decided you don't really fight Santa Claus or Oprah," he says, "so we removed her."
In an extended interview with TIME, Davis detailed what might have been in the campaign ad war — and what self-censorship the McCain staff imposed on themselves regarding the issue of race. For most of the campaign, Davis functioned as McCain's silent partner. While journalists hounded McCain's senior campaign aides, people like Steve Schmidt, Mark Salter and Rick Davis (no relation), Fred Davis worked in the shadows.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
That would've been pretty dumb, considering Trump endorsed McCain.
As in, the one who pissed away the election?
” Davis says that concern about race played a major role in the entire aesthetic of McCain’s ads.”
Wright ads -racist.
Dancing with Ellen ( twice )-racist.
Personally, I thought this made Obsama look gay.
“The photographs of Obama that the ads used, for instance, which often showed Obama elongated and smiling, were carefully selected,
he recalls. “We chose them with only one thing in mind, and that is to not make them bad pictures
because bad pictures would be seen as racist,” Davis says.
The photo that McCain always used of Obama was weird.I knew there had to be a reason.
Theye were even afraid to use music.
“ He says the campaign also agonized over the music in the ads, paying special care not to play drum-heavy tracks that could be seen as an African tribal reference.
“We were held to a totally different standard,” he says.”
I think they held themselves to a different standard.
The afraid of the “ NYT and MSNBC standard.”
Why are Republicans so strong on the military battlefield, but, so afraid on the political battlefield ?
Palin is the only one that did any damage...! She's still flying!
Maybe the McCain people were spooked, so to speak, by the tremendous outcry in the mainstream media about the ads against Harold Ford, Jr., a couple of years ago—phony charges of racism that became part of conventional wisdom.
John McCain did not want to win the election, period.
If people can’t speak freely and honestly without the fear of being called a racist, then we haven’t come as far as we think we have.
McCain wimped out, let’s face it. The best thing he did was put Palin on his team. Without her, he would’ve lost more states.
It is amazing that a pilot who tasted just about all the cruelty that one human can inflict on another, was so afraid to confront his opponent. It was Palin who forced the Ayers issue, and McCain halfhearted raised it in the last debate, then allowed obama to dismiss it out of hand without a challenge. This is typical McCain, in 2000 he at first said that he saw the Confederate flag as a symbol of heritage, and it was strictly up to South Carolina whether or not it should fly above their capitol. Within days, after being called a racist, he retracted his original statement, and denouned the flag as a symbol of racism. Earlier this year he was in Selma AL apologizing for not having supported the MLK holiday, again because he was accused of being a racist. In this day and age must would rather be accused of being a child molester than be accused of being a racist.
Yes, Ford lost (although by a small margin) since the people in Tennessee were familiar with the Ford family, but the bogus charges of racism could be fitted into the mainstream media’s template of Republican racist tactics (see “Willie Horton”) for the national audience.
The problem is it wasn’t a battle of marketing; it was a failure of McCain trying to attack Barack Obama on the issues (AKA standing up for conservatism)!.
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