“This Should Be A ‘Have You No Decency’ Moment”: The Deafening Silence Of The GOP Contenders On Trump’s Ad
When Donald Trump first watched his new TV ad that began airing this week, he said, “Play it again. I love the feel of it.” I, too, had to play it again, not because I too loved the feel, but out of amazement that this is what the front runner for the Republican nomination had chosen to put in his first TV ad of the campaign.
Forget the usual introductory bio or soaring vision for America. The ad itself pieces together the most extreme, bigoted pieces of Donald Trump’s platform including banning all Muslims from entering the country and building a wall to keep out immigrants. Perhaps worse than the ad itself was the lack of any kind of reaction from the other GOP contenders for the nomination, their deafening silence speaking even louder than the ad.
The ad proclaims that banning Muslims from entering our country is the right way to keep Americans safe, and in video that turns out to be footage from Morocco, not Mexico, we’re warned that closing off the border with a wall is the only immigration reform we need.
This should be a “have you no decency?” moment, but sadly, we shouldn’t be surprised that no candidate has stood up to Trump’s ad in any meaningful way. They’re not speaking out because they are in lock step, following Trump’s lead.
Marco Rubio has proposed shutting down mosques in the United States. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz believe we should only allow Christian — not Muslim — refugees from Syria. Ben Carson likened refugees to “rabid dogs.”
Of course, demeaning rhetoric and policies aren’t just limited to the anti-Muslim comments we’re hearing from the Republican candidates. Discussing immigration policy, Chris Christie compared immigrants to trackable FedEx packages. Jeb Bush compared President Obama’s executive actions that protect DREAMers from deportation to those of a “Latin American dictator.” Marco Rubio stated that we should “absolutely” have a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border; and he’s jumped on the Trump bandwagon of over-the-top rhetoric, insisting that President Obama has “deliberately weakened America.”
Silly us to expect that any candidate will call anything that Trump says or does “a bridge too far,” when it is a bridge they have already crossed themselves.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way, The Blog, The Huffington Post, January 6, 2016
“Children Are Off Limits”: If Ted Cruz Is Going To Use His Daughters As Props, He Should Be Mocked For It
Ted Cruz, a leading presidential candidate, released a new Christmas-themed ad — a lighthearted riff on familiar themes, in which he tweaked words from a well-known holiday story to fit his campaign platform. He appeared as himself, alongside his wife and his two young daughters, who dutifully recited lines that had been scripted to further their father’s agenda.
What’s a satirist to do?
Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes decided not to focus on the candidate’s message, but the manner in which it was pitched — namely, the fact that Cruz used his children as mouthpieces for his campaign.
There wasn’t any mistaking her intent, either. The headline for the cartoon, which featured Cruz’s daughters as monkeys on a leash being controlled by a Santa-clad Cruz turning an organ grinder, laid it out: “Ted Cruz Uses His Kids As Political Props.” And she explained her feelings further, in a tweet:
Ted Cruz has put his children in a political ad- don’t start screaming when editorial cartoonists draw them as well. https://t.co/7hafBacOiK
— Ann Telnaes (@AnnTelnaes) December 22, 2015
She also made her case in a note that ran alongside the cartoon in the Washington Post:
“[T]here is an unspoken rule in editorial cartooning that a politician’s children are off-limits. … But when a politician uses his children as political props, as Ted Cruz recently did in his Christmas parody video in which his eldest daughter read (with her father’s dramatic flourish) a passage of an edited Christmas classic, then I figure they are fair game.”
Yet the cartoon was pulled.
The editor who pulled it, Fred Hiatt, said he didn’t agree with Telnaes and hadn’t viewed the cartoon before it was posted. Hiatt echoed Telnaes’s original disclaimer, saying in the editor’s note that has supplanted the cartoon on the Post’s site: “It’s generally been the policy of our editorial section to leave children out of it.” However, he said that he did not agree with her that an exception to that practice was warranted in the case of Cruz and his daughters.
Jeff Danziger, a political cartoonist and acquaintance of Telnaes, sided with her. “I think she’s right,” Danziger said in an email. “If [Cruz] uses his daughters to get votes, he’s the one putting them on the stage.” (Danziger’s work appears in The National Memo.)
So assuming Cruz’s actions were deserving of editorial comment in cartoon form, would there have been a more appropriate way to go about it? Perhaps the problem was a lack of context. Readers didn’t necessarily need to be familiar with the ad that Telnaes was referencing, which had been released three days earlier, on Dec. 19, although of course that would have helped.
It’s possible there was a broader satirical target than simply Cruz and his daughters. After all, candidates’ family members have often appeared in campaign materials: Whether it’s pictures of Hillary Clinton holding her infant granddaughter, Charlotte, or the McCain, Palin, and Romney progenitors gamely posing for group photos, children and families humanize the candidates and drive home campaign messages by putting a memorable face on abstract talking points about “safety,” “family,” and “the future.”
But the degree to which Cruz has been using his children – and his dad, and his mom, and his aunt – is worth noting. Buzzfeed recently unearthed footage posted by Cruz’s campaign for Senate that was culled from 16-hour videos of him interacting with his family, but it’s clear from the videos that these aren’t surreptitiously filmed get-togethers or spontaneous hangouts. They play eerily as though Cruz had sat down with his mom and dad, prompting them to sing the praises of their wonderfully competent son.
Does anyone really think Telnaes was attacking Cruz’s children, rather than Cruz himself?
The cartoon’s depiction of the girls as monkeys was clearly an attempt to draw them in a stock role as a beggar’s pawns; it seems highly disingenuous to advance the argument that Telnaes was in any way criticizing the girls’ looks or character, which would, of course, be an ugly and reprehensible thing to do.
Telnaes criticized their father for using them in such a grossly crass way, trying to score political points by playing cute. And now, ironically — since the cartoon caricatured Cruz as a panhandler — by pulling the ad, the Washington Post has given the Texas senator a whole new excuse to ask for more money and more ammunition to use in his screeds about how the “mainstream,” “liberal” media treats him unfairly. Cruz is still grinding that organ, and getting his daughters to dance.
By: Stephanie Schwartz, The National Memo, December 23, 2015
“Citizens United And New Media Are On A Collision Course”: New Technology Has Potential To Deal A Blow To Big Money In Politics
New media is challenging the basic business model of advertisements as a way to pay for television programming. First came remote controls and options like Tivo, which allowed viewers to skip ads. Now, in the age of digital streaming, the number of households that are “cord cutters” (no cable or satellite television service) has increased 60% in the last 5 years.
This evolution comes just as the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United allowed for unlimited contributions to campaign super pacs – whose main role has been to pay for expensive television advertising. The conflation of those two developments might help explain why Jeb Bush’s super pac has spent over $15 million on television ads (far more than any other campaign), and yet their candidate has dropped to fifth place in the polls, leading long-time Bush family friend John Sununu to say, “I have no feeling for the electorate anymore. It’s not responding the way it used to.”
We essentially saw the same thing in the 2012 election when Karl Rove’s super pacs had a 1% return on their investment in television ads, while a video recorded by a waiter at a Romney event was likely a game-changer. At some point super pacs are going to have to ask themselves what they should be spending all those millions of dollars on if television advertising doesn’t move the needle on poll numbers, while free media becomes a determining factor.
It’s also interesting to note that a candidate like Donald Trump has spent very little money so far and recently swore off having any super pacs. The reason he’s been able to do that is because he gets a tremendous amount of free media for saying outrageous things. That poses it’s own kind of danger as long as the press prioritizes the sensational over the substantive. But in the end, it is not significantly different from all the free media the Obama campaign got with the video of Romney’s “47%” remarks in 2012.
The one Republican candidate whose super pacs are experimenting more aggressively with the use of new media is Ted Cruz. Kellyanne Conway, who runs one of the Cruz super pacs, recently said that their goal was to be “more surgical, spending on digital, cable, direct mail, radio, in addition to TV.”
Brian Fisher, who runs an organization called “Online for Life” (which has developed apps and social media to connect with women seeking to end a pregnancy), has formed a company called Red Metrics LLC that will serve as the data and digital operation for Cruz’s four Keep the Promise super pacs. One of the visible results of that collaboration is the Facebook page: Reigniting the Promise, which already has over 380,000 followers.
To date, the Cruz super pacs have spent almost nothing on television ads, and yet their candidate is inching up in the polls and his campaign has raised more “hard money” than anyone in the Republican field except Ben Carson. Whether or not Cruz has a chance at actually being the nominee remains to be seen. But when you compare the results of super pac spending on new media vs paid television advertising, it is obvious that there is a new game in town.
It is always important to remember that the role of money in politics is to influence voters. As long as super pacs continue to spend their money on something that doesn’t have much impact on them (estimates are that they’ll spend $4.4 billion on TV ads this election cycle), the concern about the wealthy being able to control our elections is muted.
On the other hand, just as new media is having an impact on the music, entertainment and publishing industries, it is also affecting political campaigns. As we’ve seen with those other industries, new media is inherently more democratic and less expensive. That puts it on a bit of a collision course with the big money that is flooding into super pacs.
New media is clearly here to stay. While mega-donors and their super pacs will catch on to that fact some day and make adjustments, it is time to begin asking ourselves whether or not this new technology has the potential to deal a definitive blow to the role of big money in politics.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 1, 2015
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