Herman Cain's new ad

On first thought, you might expect that a kind of Darwinian mechanism operating between the press and presidential candidates these days would weed out all but two classes of political advertisements: the bland, anodyne type, and the dishonest, viciously negative type. A candidate would want to avoid even the faintest whiff of strangeness. After all, the press hounded Howard Dean from the campaign back in 2004 just for making a funny noise.

You would be wrong.

To be sure, the 2008 presidential season had its share of bizarreness. (Remember Mike Gravel's ad featuring him hurling a rock into a pond?) But the 2012 season has a bad case of The Strange, and not just for fringe candidates either. First we have Lucas Baiano, who made Michael Bay movie preview-style ads first for Tim Pawlenty and then for Rick Perry, and now Herman Cain comes out with this gem:

I can't believe someone paid money for this. We've got a droopy, mustachioed Mark Block, clearly unaccustomed to the camera, making a lot of awkward, easily mocked statements ("America's never seen a candidate like Herman Cain"). Then he takes a drag from a cigarette (???), and we cut to Cain himself, his head taking up the entire right side of the frame. We can't see his neck, so when he turns towards us, it has a creepy disembodied feel to it. Then he smiles, and, well, you'll just have to watch. Let's just say it's not surprising Kevin Drum was rendered helpless with laughter.

James Fallows says, half in jest, that this is a kind of bank shot making fun of Obama for his failure to quit smoking. Andrew Sullivan thinks it’s awesome. I don’t buy it. If it’s a snarky dig at Obama, it’s not one that most voters are going to catch— nobody cares if Obama smokes or not. If it’s a sincere ad, if Cain is really that clueless, then he is on the short road to national laughingstock.

By the way, Mr. Cain is now leading in the polls.

(Cross-posted at Ten Miles Square.)

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that...

Russiagate and the Left, Round II

Corey Robin has responded to my article arguing that the left should take the Trump-Russia story more seriously . I do appreciate that he considers me an ally, and I feel the same towards him. However I am not convinced. The points I want to make are somewhat disconnected, so I will just take them one at a time. What should be done? Robin complains that I don't give much attention to the question of how we should respond to Russian electoral espionage. As an initial matter, the question of whether a problem is an important one is logically distinct from what the response should be. There is a sizable vein of skepticism about Russiagate on the left, and the argument of the post was that skepticism was misplaced. Solutions can be worked out later. This point is rather similar to the centrist argument that you can't talk about Medicare for All unless you've got a fully costed-out bill detailing all the necessary taxes and regulation. However, I have advanced some pol...

Ryan Cooper

Search This Blog