The Generic Attack Ad Strikes Back

Darrell Steinberg may have the most money in the race, but he is not immune to attack. When I got home from school today, these images were awaiting me (or really my parents because they can vote, but they already did so whatever. I can pretend.)

If the purpose of advertising is to provoke an emotional response, I guess this one worked in a sense because it made me laugh a little. I don't think that was the intent. It felt like a half-hearted imitation of the political attack ads used by local and national candidates all over, with the same appeals and fallacies but somehow lacking punch.

The first accusation is of a category I think may be required for these types of ads: Political Junkets and Gifts. There is a little facts and figures appeal in there, but it falls down under closer examination. In many contexts, $23,000 is a lot of money--you could buy a car with that--so presumably whoever made this thing hopes people will see a candidate who took that much money as corrupt. However, in the context of gifts and travel expenses over the course of his 6 years as Pro Tem, $23,000 is not much; a couple trips or so. In addition, I wonder if anyone really pays any attention to attacks like this one when they have become so omnipresent; every political attack ad seems to make the same claims about candidates' acceptance of various things, so can you really differentiate them that way?

The next attack was an excellent example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy in real life. Even the most hardcore cultural relativist would be hard-pressed to defend a culture of corruption, but do they really have anything here? There have in fact been 3 Senate Democrats charged with crimes in recent years, two for fraud and corruption, but drawing a line from them to Steinberg is tricky business. The assumption we are supposed to make is that everything that happened while Steinberg can be blamed for everything that happened when was the leader of the Senate, but no reason is given as to why. The actual argument: Steinberg became Pro Tem, bad things happened, and thus Steinberg caused bad things to happen. Yikes.

I didn't find the back side quite as entertaining, but its claims did not escape my skeptical eye. My favorite is the tying of McKinley Village to increased carbon emissions. For about a second, it makes sense: people will live there and drive there, something people did not do when it was a bunch of grass next to the highway, so there will be more carbon emissions, right? Actually, that doesn't even sound very convincing. Unless McKinley Village is actually going to create new people and cars that otherwise would never have polluted anything, it is not going to increase emissions. In fact, infill projects that allow people to live close to where they work, rather than long drives away in the suburbs, should decrease fossil fuel emissions. The ad has to use vagueness to try to connect Steinberg and pollution because if it were to fully explain its argument it would not make any sense. That's probably the case for a lot of ads. 

One common theme in the documentaries we've watched in class this semester is the overload of media messages in today's world and the need to stick out in one way or another. Try though advertisers might, it is not easy to get people's attention for very long with an ad, and something tells me this one is not destined to break through.