UPDATED 1:20 am MST: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3855133 ABC has uploaded the ad to its site. It’s a bit washed out, but it is all there.
Tom Tancredo’s campaign ad is designed to be “shocking,”and it has legs, though the candidate might not….
We in his home state, Colorado, are not supposed to see Representative Tom Tancredo’s ad. Neither are you. Unless you live in Iowa.
But Representative Tancredo is hoping his ‘shock’ ad will generate free publicity, so you might see it anyway. He’s hoping that media will carry it for free as ‘news.’ They likely will, actually have already, but perhaps not the way Rep. Tancredo imagined.
Terry Jessup from KCNC CBS4 affiliate in Denver reported on his conversation with Tancredo today.
Congressman Tancredo, “… told me he has to do well in Iowa or money will dry up and he’ll have to drop out of presidential race. He says the controversial new ad will definitely get him noticed.”
The ad comes at a time when Representative Tancredo’s numbers are flagging and his donations are way down. The ad is meant to provoke and inspire lots of media coverage so that the ad will infiltrate people’s living rooms over and over again… and then hopefully money will roll in again. The ad was designed to make big ad buys.
He may get bloggers, but some think he might also, without meaning to, get YouTube. From distant thunder I hear, there are parodies of his ad already in the works.
Think of the AppleHillary ad. Think of the original ad from which Tancredo’s ad appears to draw its oeuvre…1964 Lyndon Johnson anti-Goldwater ad (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKs-bTL-pRg) showing a child counting daisy petals, then stop-motion zooming into her eye… where a mushroom cloud forms. Lyndon’s voice-over implying, Elmer Gantry style, that all of God’s children are going to die if Goldwater, ‘nuclear war monger,’ is elected.
Add ‘Eau de SNL’ to all this, and there may be a YouTube Festival revolving around scary ads… although have you seen the content in horror and disaster films teenagers not only sit through in cinema without blanching once, but also laugh over?
Tancredo goes on to say the ad is meant to make people uncomfortable… the ad shows the imaginary blowing up of a family shopping center by a terrorist. Tancredo says: “There is nothing, absolutely nothing that says this can’t happen in the United States.”
Tancredo commented about his ad depicting a seeming young person in a hoodie with backpack blowing families to Kingdom Come: “I thought it (the final ad) was a little tame. When I explained what I wanted, um and they came back with this after two or three different iterations of it, um I finally accepted it, but ( Tancredo laughs here) what I had in mind, was um a little more dramatic than this.”
Tancredo’s ad opens with him standing in a light-toned, patterned-fabric suit, next to large American flag on left screen. There’s a wall of Reader’s Digest looking “Great Books Club” hardbacks in red. green and dark yellow in the bookcase behind him. Representative Tancredo says: “Hi, I’m Tom Tancredo, and I approve this message… because someone needs to say it.”
Then an announcer comes on: a fellow sounding a lot like the man who used to do all the spooky movie preview ads, one who could just be saying, “I think I’ll go do the dishes”– and make it sound like Rodan, clawing for blood of the firstborn, has just landed again. The opening carries the sound of a heart beating hard in the background. This under-sound sort of goes into an arrhythmia in the middle of the ad, and then quits halfway through the word ‘politicians,’ near the end, an odd symbolic place to stop.
The announcer says (verbatim transcript I took down from TV ad):
“There are consequences to open borders beyond the 20 million aliens who’ve come to take our jobs. Islamic terrorists are now free to roam US soil. Jihadists who are fraught with hate, free to do here as they’ve done in London, in Spain, and Russia
“… the price we pay for spineless politicians who refuse to defend our borders against those who come to kill.”
Aside from 2 serious errors in the root logic of the ad, one of which infers that if our Southern and Northern Borders were closed tight like a vacuum-sealed coffee jar, it would prevent terrorism… it wouldn’t. The 9-11 terrorists were all here legally, had come right through government daylight channels.
The second wobbly inference in the ad, that others come illegally to take ‘our jobs’… it’s hard to imagine that the souls who scale the fence are also carrying a DayTimer and know how to run Vista (We can hardly run Vista ourselves, come on)….
but, setting aside those underlying assumptions in the ad…
The visual is a seeming young male, ‘Hoodie man,’ with backpack. Pan shopping center. Pan leg of child running in shopping center. And etc. Finally, legs of Hoodie man shown as he leaves his back pack on the floor. Bloodied child being carried. (Picture of actual child from Russia) Then,
Kaboom. Audio: a big ‘shot’ sound. Not the sound of a real explosion. Not a high powered firearm either. More like a synthetically amplified sound in echo mode on the board, with maybe some ‘concert hall’ reverb/ tremolo laid over.
The final shot then to close the ad: a black screen with the words: “Tancredo before it’s too late.”
This final screen may confuse to some extent, because the highly symbolic last shot showing a black screen, has been used since time out of mind in cinema to mean, ‘and everyone died,’ (or characters are now being sexual and ‘Shhh you aren’t allowed to peek’).
In this campaign ad simulating a terrorist act, however, the final graphic of a totally black screen with lettering reversed-out in the final message, makes the symbology appear as though everyone on earth has died…. except Representative Tancredo.
Colorado political analyst and consultant, Eric Sondermann believes “linking illegal immigration and potential terrorism is a legitimate campaign issue, but that the ad ignores the core of these complexities,” and that Tancredo attacks in typical ‘over the top’ fashion…
During the televised debates of Republicans running for nomination, Tancredo’s ‘out there’ style of thinking and speaking, has obscured with heavy smoke thus far, exactly what Rep. Tancredo’s actual problem-solving stratagems are in effective detail.
It may be that many a politician has the ability to rouse others by poking at the same sore over and over, but a politician also needs skills to heal what is wrent or injured, to better what is broken. That takes gaining and keeping cooperative coalitions to carry ideas forward, something Rep. Tancredo has yet to demonstrate.
Some think his broad statements are meant to draw attention to himself for attention’s sake. Some think he made a good many ‘not quite on-register’ comments when he used to be a sometimes guest on a weekly public access TV show in Denver long ago.
But, Sondermann, who has guided many a politician’s campaign for office, points out too, “One of the great things about having little or no chance of being elected, is it’s liberating to do whatever you want.”
There’s a point there, a tempered one: The clang is that Tancredo has used his extensive TV time today and earlier — mostly talking casually and with some chortling about how the ad is supposed raise money for him, how he thinks this ad is really going to disturb people … rather than talking about the issue he’s says is utterly critical. Safety of human beings at malls.
Tancredo told reporters today that he’d heard intelligence reports about terrorists planning to bomb shopping malls in Chicago, L.A., and other cities around the holidays.
He said he approved for the ad, a grisly graphic photo of a schoolchild hostage in Russia, because ‘he was there, he saw the aftermath firsthand.’ Some have said he visited the site quite some time afterward, but was not there when the event took place nor during recovery.
He says if this ad works in Iowa, he will use it in New Hampshire.
No one of right mind rules out that anything could happen anywhere in the world, including the United States. And that though there isn’t a terrorist under every bed, there are insane people who wish to do mass murder.
But, some are bound to ask if the image Representative Tancredo has in his mind, and now in his ad, if this is his absolute worst mind-image… and if a candidate seeking nomination believes this worst will come to pass with all his heart and mind… isn’t the idea of wanting people to give money for an election and inauguration that are 12 and 14 months away, instead of acting in ‘emergency mode’ to intervene so this ‘worst fear’ will not occur…isn’t that somehow odd?
Some will ask too, Has Representative Tancredo’s ‘accidentally or on-purpose’ bombastic style burnt so many bridges for him politically with peers in power, that those others are already working on these matters behind the scenes… and simply excluding Tancredo?
Some will notice that one of the worst terrorists in the history of the United States was not an Islamic anything. He was a homegrown Timothy McVeigh. Other groups who are Islamic, who are Latino, and who are all here legally or were born in the US for generations now, and contributed much to this land … will, and rightfully so, object to an ad claiming their groups and no others, are the ‘problem’ one more time… all in order for a politico to try to raise money on their backs. Again.
But, James Dobson from Focus on the Family hasn’t made his individual pick yet, and his office says he’s considering throwing his endorsement behind one of four Republican Candidates, using anti-abortion as his weighing scale… and Representative Tancredo is one of those four.
Yet also, Representative Tancredo has said he will not seek re-election to his Congressional seat if he doesn’t win this nomination from his party.
In the end, given all the donations he’s received to run and… the one-million-dollars Representative Tancredo says he spent on this ad… it would seem ironic for the ad to run faster and reach further, than the candidate who ponied up for it.
h/t Helaine