In “Alabama Goes Viral” Ms. Collins says this has been a peculiar political year even for Alabama, where viral campaign videos are turning heads. Mr. Blow says “Give Them Something They Can Feel,” and that when it comes to the BP oil spill, President Obama should show more emotion and less reserve. Mr. Herbert, in “An Unnatural Disaster,” says the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the latest disaster to result from an unholy alliance of government and giant corporations.
Here’s Ms. Collins:
Alabama goes to the polls!
O.K., not an opening likely to maintain reader interest. Let’s start again, with the words of Dale Peterson, candidate for agriculture commissioner in Tuesday’s Republican primary:
“Listen up! Alabama ag commissioner is one of the most powerful positions in Alabama. Responsible for five billion dollars. Bet you didn’t know that. You know why? Thugs and criminals!”
This is the start of Peterson’s campaign ad. He rides into the screen on a horse that looks increasingly worried as things progress. Brandishing a rifle, the 64-year-old farmer barks at the camera about his opponent (“a dummy”), somebody stealing his yard signs and immigrants being “bused in by the thousands.” The overall effect is like being cornered at a party by an eccentric neighbor who thinks the garbage man is spying on him for the federal government. It’s extremely popular.
There is quite a lot of this sort of thing going on this campaign season. You raise enough cash to film an outrageous ad. Then you post it on the Web and pray that it goes viral, gets mentioned on the cable talk shows and draws in enough donations to put the thing on TV.
The trend goes back to Demon Sheep, the legendary ad for Carly Fiorina’s campaign for the Senate nomination in California. It had regular sheep and then cartoon sheep and then a guy crawling around the ground disguised as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He had on a cardboard mask with red light bulbs for eyes. I believe the message was supposed to be fiscal responsibility, but really, all you got was Demon Sheep. Red eyes. Carly Fiorina.
The man who made it, Fred Davis III, then took up the cause of Tim James, a deeply unremarkable Alabama businessman who wants to be governor. To separate James from the crowd, Davis came up with “Language,” a 30-second ad in which the candidate stared at the camera and demanded to know why “our politicians make us give driver’s license exams in 12 languages.” (The actual answer is: a federal court ruling.)
“This is Alabama. We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it,” James said irritably. “We’ll only give the test in English if I’m governor. Maybe it’s the businessman in me, but we’ll save money.”
James’s staff insisted it was fiscal conservatism, not xenophobia, that put their candidate on the driver’s license warpath. But Alabama’s tests are automatically graded by computer, using federally financed software — even the approximately 2 percent that are taken in a language other than English. Given the fact that the state would probably have to defend the policy in court, James’s idea would actually be a new expense.
But I cannot emphasize how totally beside the point all that is. “Language” went viral. “This is the first election in a long time where the fate of the campaign really did change on a single ad,” said David Lanoue, chairman of the University of Alabama political science department.
James is now one of the front-runners, despite a last-minute crisis involving a rumor that he believed the state was spending too much money on the University of Alabama football coach, who makes $4.1 million a year. Which James vigorously denied wanting to cut. It’s the businessman in him.
He now has a sequel to the driver’s license ad, in which he says that as a businessman, he feels sex offenders should be required to “re-register with the state, face to face, every 90 days.”
“Some politicians think that might inconvenience the sex offenders,” James said somberly. He did not explain who those politicians were, but I suspect the same guys who keep stealing Dale Peterson’s signs.
This has been a peculiar political year, even for Alabama. James’s biggest opponent, Bradley Byrne, was attacked by a group called True Republican PAC, which ran an ad charging that Byrne supported the teaching of evolution.
Byrne, who has multiple degrees and was chancellor of the state community college system, indignantly denied the charges.
But wait, there’s more. It turns out that True Republican PAC was bankrolled by the state teachers’ union, which is angry at Byrne for trying to ban teachers from holding second jobs as state legislators. The Alabama Education Association apparently felt a good payback would be to spend $500,000 on a group that encourages people to vote against any candidate who believes there is a scientific explanation for the origin of life.
Meanwhile, over in the Fifth Congressional District primary, Les Phillip, a Republican, has an ad that features him telling a story of two young African-American men. One did great, served his country and became Les Phillip, while the other fell in with terrorists and other bad company and became Barack Obama.
So far, this is only on the Web, but the campaign is hoping to go viral.
And it’s going to get nothing but more stupid… Here’s Mr. Blow:
There are many things at which the president is extraordinarily gifted. Emoting isn’t one of them.
Thursday, in the opening remarks of his press conference, the president said: “Every day I see this leak continue I am angry and frustrated.”
I wasn’t feeling it.
Then, as the press conference was ending, after he had meandered through an unsatisfying mix of defenses and didacticism, he tried again: “When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ ” Score. After all, whose heart doesn’t go out to a cute little girl when she worries?
People needed to be assured that Obama possessed three basic presidential traits: being informed, engaged and empathetic. As for the first trait, he was superb as always. I think amassing facts is his idea of being warm and fuzzy.
On the second, he was a bit wobbly. How is it that he didn’t know if S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, who was the director of the Minerals Management Service, an agency at the heart of the spill debacle, had resigned or been fired that morning? Maybe he would have known if earlier he had not been in the Rose Garden taking pictures with Coach Mike Krzyzewski and the Duke men’s basketball team.
This is the same coach who famously bristled that Obama should stick to fixing the economy after the president picked North Carolina to win the N.C.A.A. championship in 2009. Maybe the coach could have reminded him that he still had more important things to do.
On the third point, empathy, Obama came up short. That is until he invoked his daughter and saved himself. Malia for the win!
Obama is going to have to dig deep on this one. He can’t afford to repeat the messaging mistakes of his first year. He can’t afford to let the right hang the Katrina label around his neck.
The spill is not Obama’s fault. It’s the result of corporate irresponsibility, ineffective regulation and the government’s lack of disaster planning, decades in the making. But, as Obama said, the cleanup is his responsibility, and polling suggests that people are growing unhappy with his handling of it. Two weeks ago, a Pew Research Center survey found that 36 percent of people disapproved of his handling of the spill. This week, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll found that 51 percent disapproved.
Such has been the narrative of his presidency: being treated like the janitor in chief — mopping up messes made by others and being chastised for leaving streaks.
Mr. President, I know that you have a self-professed aversion to appearing angry, but in this case you have every right to be angry and to openly empathize with the anger of others. Otherwise, by running from one label, you risk earning another — incompetent. You feel me?
Now here’s Mr. Herbert:
“Where I was wrong,” said President Obama at his press conference on Thursday, “was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.”
With all due respect to the president, who is a very smart man, how is it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious players on the planet, somehow “had their act together” with regard to worst-case scenarios.
These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by some fanciful honor system. These are greedy merchant armies drilling blindly at depths a mile and more beneath the seas while at the same time doing all they can to stifle the government oversight that is necessary to protect human lives and preserve the integrity of the environment.
President Obama knows that. He knows — or should know — that the biggest, most powerful companies do not have the best interests of the American people in mind when they are closing in on the kinds of profits that ancient kingdoms could only envy. BP’s profits are counted in the billions annually. They are like stacks and stacks of gold glittering beneath a brilliant sun. You don’t want to know what people will do for that kind of money.
There is nothing new to us about this. Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?
The idea of relying on the assurances of these corporate predators that they are looking out for the safety of their workers and the health of surrounding communities and the environment is beyond absurd. Even after the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon site, BP officials were telling us (as their noses grew longer and longer) that about only 1,000 barrels of oil a day were escaping into the Gulf of Mexico. Nearly a month into the disaster, BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, was publicly offering the comforting assessment that the environmental damage resulting from the spill would likely be “very, very modest.”
They were somewhat wide of the mark (as reputable scientists were telling us day after day after day). We now know, of course, that this is the worst spill in U.S. history, that instead of 1,000 barrels a day, something in the range of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day have likely been spewing into the gulf. And the environmental impact can fairly be described as catastrophic.
The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families.
President Obama spoke critically a couple of weeks ago about the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the federal government. It’s not just a cozy relationship. It’s an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.
Forget BP for a moment. When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily sand?
President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was “moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.” Well, he can’t ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee future disastrous spills.
The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.
Mr. Hayward of BP was on television on Friday referring to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent fouling of the Gulf of Mexico as a “natural disaster.” He was wrong, as usual. Like the unholy alliance of government and big business, this tragedy set in motion by Mr. Hayward’s corporation is a grotesquely harmful and wholly unnatural disaster.
