AppId is over the quota
In the last days and hours before the Iowa caucus, campaign ads are flooding local television, adding a riot of green fields, church spires and bustling factories to more prosaic spots for Activia, mattress clearance sales and New Year’s tips from Dr. Patricia Tice, owner of Etiquette Iowa. (Customers should say “thank you” to sales clerks as well as the customary “have a nice day.”)
The campaign commercials are clustered around local newscasts and Sunday talk shows, but also pop up in the middle of “Dr. Phil,” “Wheel of Fortune” and “The Tonight Show.”
The messages about family ties and unfettered free markets are all but impossible to ignore. More intensely now than ever before, political ads are driving the polls and shaping the dizzying race. Many are positive, many are negative, and some are so artfully opaque that they are more like brainteasers than political pitches.
Determined caucus voters may take the time to scrutinize the small-print disclaimer or search the Internet for the provenance of ads placed by organizations with generically patriotic names like The Red, White and Blue Fund and Make Us Great Again. Other viewers must piece together clues and fill in the blanks like contestants on “Wheel of Fortune.” At least in that endeavor, the constant repetition is a help.
One of the more frequent, unfriendly ads, “Whoops,” features Mr. Gingrich in a clip montage saying he made a mistake, with a women’s voice asking mockingly, “Haven’t we had enough mistakes?”
The ad could be on behalf of any of Mr. Gingrich’s rivals, and the name of the “super PAC” that paid for it, Restore Our Future, doesn’t give many clues: Plenty of candidates promise to “restore” family values.
On a third or fourth viewing, however, even amateurs might notice that among the many Gingrich mistakes is “attacking Mitt Romney.” So, Restore Our Future is mostly dedicated to restoring Mr. Romney’s future.
And, perhaps unwittingly, that of Mr. Santorum’s. The former Pennsylvania senator is benefiting from the attacks ads sinking Mr. Gingrich.
Mr. Santorum didn’t have money for many ads, but his last-minute surge won him free publicity: his latest ad, a peppy, triumphalist montage of the candidate with his large family, is all over the Internet and was shown, in excerpt, when he appeared Sunday on “Meet The Press.”
Some political ads aren’t about politics. A series of commercials shown on Friday in Des Moines vaguely promoted positive thinking with a medley of pleasant images — yoga at sunset, sailboats, grandchildren, birthday cakes, college graduation — that could just as easily promote an insurance company or Paxil.
These ads were placed by the Foundation for a Better Life, an organization originally financed by the billionaire conservative Philip F. Anschutz, which promotes inspirational messages in the media.
The Romney campaign said that the Better Life ads are unconnected to the candidate. And yet, the foundation’s message is so oblique and rosy that with a few more flags and a more muscular soundtrack, it could pass for a Romney ad. One of his recent spots, a pastoral poem of green fields, farmers, cows, high school science fairs and words like “can-do,” could lead some to believe the candidate is a Midwestern farmer, not a Harvard-educated business executive and former Massachusetts governor.
There aren’t many anti-Romney ads, at least not as many as one might expect. But an entertaining spot is a double-blast attack on Mr. Romney and Mr. Gingrich, portraying them as establishment insiders. It’s framed as a 1930s-style black-and-white newsreel. As newspaper headlines swirl accusingly, a narrator denounces their misdeeds — “Romneycare” and “Freddie Mac” — in the rapid, breathless tone once used to describe Rommel’s sweep through North Africa.
It’s old-fashioned and a little corny; so, it seems to smack of a pitch by Representative Paul. Instead, it is paid for by Make Us Great Again, a super PAC that favors another Texan, Governor Perry.
Perhaps, more than most candidates, Mr. Gingrich’s ads have been on a meandering, sometimes turbulent, course, much like his topsy-turvy campaign. His early ads in Iowa were dreamscapes of an idealized back-porch America that echoed Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” spots of 1984. But lately, Mr. Gingrich has been the target of so many attack ads that a pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, is running negative ads against the negative ads. (An indignant narrator urges voters to ignore the “falsehoods” spread by “the liberal Republican establishment.”)
The Gingrich campaign is so eager to show the candidate in a favorable light that it has even reissued ads he made with his wife, Callista, in 2009 to promote a documentary on Ronald Reagan.
And desperation must have inspired the latest ad in support of Mr. Gingrich, a 30-minute infomercial sponsored by Newsmax, the conservative magazine and Web site. Even to the untutored eye, the half-hour pitch is gloomy and looks hastily made. The lighting is unflattering and the sound is imperfectly synched. Mr. Gingrich speaks with ease and confidence, but with the sound turned off, some images look like material for his rivals: old photographs of Mr. Gingrich in long sideburns and glasses, black-and-white shots of the former House speaker glad-handing on the steps of the Capitol, and even looking chummy with Democratic insiders.
Mr. Gingrich talks up his own proposals, but spends almost as much time defending himself from his rivals’ charges, particularly the income he received from Freddie Mac.
He also complains that negative ads choked his ascent. But he ends his stretch in Iowa with a Newsmax ad that is anything but positive or cheerful.
Mr. Santorum, on the other hand, has hijacked the Gingrich helium. He can still look grim and a bit truculent in interviews, but in his eve-of-election ad, with his family at his side, he looks radiant.
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