Six years ago, as the nascent liberal blogosphere first began to coalesce, one particular incident quickly became seared in our minds, forever to be a rallying cry – something we would never let go unanswered again. I’m speaking of Saxby Chambliss’s unthinkably odious ad in which he slurred Max Cleland by pairing the triple-amputee war hero with images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein:
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I know you haven’t forgotten this grave offense – none of us have. That’s why I’ve put our goal thermometer right along side that ad, so that we can finally exact payback for this most outrageous and underhanded attack.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t think we’d see this day so soon. Georgia hasn’t exactly been fertile territory for Democrats in some time, and I figured Saxby would cruise to re-election. Fortunately, the political environment and the quality of our nominee have changed things dramatically. We need to seize this opportunity, to honor Max Cleland, to show that we won’t get bullied, and to send a great populist progressive like Jim Martin to the Senate.
We’ve already made awesome progress toward our goal in just twenty-four hours. But time is running very, very short. Barely more than three weeks remain until election day. Please give now.
He’s running against Lynn “Uppity” Westmoreland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
I’ve been hearing since I joined the blogosphere in 2003 that Chambliss ran this atrocious ad that “morphed Cleland’s face into Osama bin Laden’s”. Hell, Markos published that claim in the Hill just a week ago.
When I finally saw a link to this ad, maybe a year ago, I searched YouTube all over to see if this was really the ad that was the subject of so much outrage. Since, for starters, it does not morph Cleland’s face into bin Laden’s, by any normal meaning of the word “morph” that I can think of.
Since then every time there has been a link to the “morph” ad, including at DKos last week, and here, it has been to this ad. So I take it there’s not another one out there that I haven’t found, and this really is the offending ad?
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I don’t find this ad to be unusually offensive at all. Now, I am not a campaigns guy, and if I had spent years of my life doing this stuff, and developing a sophisticated set of standards for what was accepted and acceptable discourse in campaigns and what was not, I can imagine that I might feel very differently. But as a campaigns outsider, I don’t get it.
Furthermore, I find something else to be radically offensive, that I seldom hear spoken of. The “voted against Bush’s vital Homeland Security Efforts 11 times” part, which is the substance on which the ad rests, is an insulting farce. I remember from the mainstream press the conflict over the new DHS, in which Lieberman carried for Bush a bill that gutted all labor protections for everyone in any agency that was migrated into DHS. I remember the bill was overwritten, such that even a good-faith Democrat willing to negotiate on that point could not support it, because the point was not merely to be able to restructure DHS in good faith, but to also be able to gut labor law utterly, and to force Democrats to vote against the President on “Homeland Security.” The whole exercise was a disingenuous stunt meant to force Democrats to vote for labor over security, so that 30 second ads like this one could be cut. It was not a serious disagreement on issues and failure of good-faith negotiations, it was a shallow, obvious political stunt. And it worked, when Cleland and others (Mondale? Shaheen? I don’t know where else this theme appeared) lost.
Anyway, I’m deeply outraged that a superficial and bullshit story was deliberately manufactured and sold to the American electorate, especially to such ill effect. That is really offensive to me. Bin Laden appearing in the early seconds of an ad, whose narrative structure is “in dangerous times, xyz…” (as opposed to something actually offensive, such as say “Cleland’s votes enabled bin Laden”, or “Democrat’s arguments are objectively pro-Saddam”), does not bother me. I’m not shocked that bin Laden would appear in any ad, in any narrative context, ever.
So help me out guys. Can anyone explain to me where various people are coming from on this?
That’s all I need to say.
This is not the morphing ad; that ad was done by Repubublican ad man Scott Howell. I’m not sure who this one was done by, but it’s so dry, it lacks Howell’s (rather vicious) flair…so I doubt it was him. I saw the morphing ad on the national news at least a dozen times in 2002, so I, too, am surprised not to see it on YouTube…though I’m unsurprised that Scott Howell no doubt burned all his copies of it…since having the guy who slurred Cleland in your employ could still be a legitimate attack on a candidate.