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 actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

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

Ryan Cooper

Search This Blog