Huzzah!!!
As regular readers know, both Burt and I are huge fans of bad political ads. 2014 being a midterm year, the question hasn’t been if we were going to get a slough of wonderfully awful ads so much as when they might begin.
Turns out, they start today! Huzzah!!!
This one is a dandy. It was made by Chris McDaniel, the Tea Party hopeful trying oust Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran. Among the highlights: a pro-Tea Party Ghost of Abe Lincoln voice over, a bizarre attempt to hawk books by Mark LeVine, a male actor who makes the worst actors on Babylon 5 look like Olivier, and a cute but talentless female staffer who I have to assume, should they win the seat, will be the subject of a future press conference in which McDaniel explains that Jesus and his wife have forgiven him about things that aren’t any of our business anyway.
Mostly, though, the ad features the vocal stylings of the Boomers, a vaudevillian singing group that features men in Elvis wigs and women wearing some kind of Communist-Party-Van-Trapp dresses that might well be the female equivalent to lederhosen. They sing a kind of parody of Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey, but — and this is the clever bit — they replace “Bill Bailey” with “Thad Cochran!”
Dear god I love this season. Enjoy:
(h/t Andrew Sullivan)
One of the things that makes this whole Democracy experiment work is that how well you campaign is actually a very good predictor of how well you serve your constituents as an elected official. So when Joe Shmoe sees this ad and thinks “My kid could do that, I should vote for the other guy”, he’s mostly right. But imagine these things flipped. and the Thad Cochrans of the world made terrible ads but were actually cursed with being excellent stewards of government. All of these secret geniuses getting outvoted by glad-handing frat-boys, then we’d really be done for.Report
I laughed, but it was a bitter laugh.Report
My goodness. Did they make that thing with PowerPoint? I suspect the whole thing got shot in a day at a public park, and it never occurred to anyone to make a separate audio track in the studio free from background noise.
The parody of Bill Bailey is actually pretty good, IMO. I’m not sure what the one dude in the Boomers who just stands there does other than wear the Elvis wig, though.
Great find.Report
@burt-likko I was thinking…
One of these days we should go back and collect all of the bad political ads and put them onto to one page, that we add onto over time, that we can link to whenever we feature new terrible ads. Kind of like a bad political ad hall of fame.Report
I’m not sure that the parody does work.
Most people don’t hear Bill Bailey as anything but longing for someone; so on an emotional level, the jingle sort of reinforces longing for Cochran.Report
I think most people don’t know the song’ swords anymore. It’s an old-timely, Dixieland-jazzy kind of song they’ve heard as an instrumental… Often played at political conventions.Report
What even fewer people know is what it’s about: a sportswriter who wrote under the name “Bill Bailey” abandoning one Chicago newspaper for another. His real name? Bill Veeck, Sr. His son, Bill junior, was the mad genius who, as owner of the St. Louis Browns, hired the three-foot-tall Eddie Gaedel as a plnch-hitter with a six-inch strike zone.
And now you know… The REST of the story.Report
Yeah, he’s one of the few players whose career stats I can rattle off from memory: PA: 1. BB: 1. BA: [null set]. He was really an actor, wasn’t he?Report
Oh, hey, I almost forgot. This guy is running for Governor in California. And he’s a pretty credible candidate, otherwise. I understand the desire to humanize a political figure, but I’m not at all sure why ninety seconds of a very high-production value pet video should make me want to vote for the guy:
Remember, this is the fellow who has to get past an actual elected officeholder to obtain the equivalent of the Republican nomination in California’s jungle primary system. An elected officeholder who is also Rob Schneider’s sex double:
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