Targeting Audiences: What Would This Ad Accomplish?

Over at Riehl World View, Dan Riehl says,

The Our Country Deserves Better PAC has put together a new anti-Obama ad. I imagine they’re looking to raise money to air it. The thing that struck me was that, because you know where something labeled an anti-Obama ad is eventually going, it sort of makes you cringe early on. You’ll likely pick-up the cringe-inducing reference if you listen to it. It’s in a reference to a Congressman’s warning.

But then a second problem sets in for me. Nothing in the ad is untruthful.

What do you think, over the top? I suspect it will play well to a portion of the base.

Here’s the problem: the ad seems to be hinting that Obama is gearing up for a coup. Heck, even though I think it’s fair to call Obama a fascist, I don’t think there’s a coup in the works. As long as we have a 2nd Amendment in this country, we’re not going to have any El Presidente for life, Republican or Democrat, in this country.

With that in mind, the ad does more harm than good. It seems like it’s designed to appeal to a very narrow slice of the conservative base, but it’s supposed to be run on TV, where you’ll probably have far more people who are likely to be offended by it than agree with it.

In fact, in that respect, it reminds me a bit of some of the more tin-eared MoveOn ads from the 2004 race. They spent far more money than any Republican group did on ads, but they didn’t get traction because their commercials were so nasty and over-the-top.

In Obama’s case, this seems to be particularly wasteful because there are so many great ways to attack him. He has broken lots of campaign promises, he lies on a regular basis, he’s weak abroad, he’s the most liberal President we’ve ever had domestically, he’s growing the deficit to unsustainable levels, he wants the largest tax hike in American history — there are so many avenues of political attack with this guy that it just doesn’t make sense to produce TV ads insinuating that he’s thinking about a coup.

Our Country Deserves Better PAC could take much of the information in the ad, take out a few things, add a few things, and they could produce a hard hitting commercial slamming Obama for corruption. Why not do that rather than produce an ad even a lot of Republicans are going to disagree with?

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