Now Playing: Elizabeth Dole : I question her judgment
Topic: Politics
The News & Observer in North Carolina has an article about the losing Dole senatorial campaign and their explanation of why the famous "godless" ad was necessary.
Dole's campaign thought it would run such an ad only as a last resort. And then it would be the mildest version of the ad.
So says Fred Davis, the Hollywood-based media consultant who produced the ad, which became one of the most discussed TV commercials in the nation during the past election.
Critics of the ad from the right and the left accused Dole of questioning Hagan's faith.
Hagan, a Sunday school teacher and elder in her Presbyterian church in Greensboro, called the ad "despicable" and ran her own ad accusing Dole of "bearing false witness against fellow Christians."
A candidate thus reveals the presence of a sufficiently clear and present danger to failure of the campaign as to justify hiring a spin doctor to empasize the trivial at the expense of the important.
But Davis insists the commercial was not designed to question Hagan's faith. He said it was about her decision to attend the fundraiser.
"It was about her judgment," Davis said in a telephone interview last week. "I never questioned her faith. A lot of people questioned that in hindsight. But that's not the point."
"That's not the point?"
How appropriate. The point is that all over this country candidates keep shallowly trusting consultants and advisors, effectively handing over their own sincerity and honesty in asking for votes based on reality.
Instead, they bring into play hired mind-slingers to create and promote the shallowest of messages using Viagra or Cialis tactics.
They hand over their own integrity regarding political ethics. They do not encourage thoughtful civic participation by bringin a fast-talking narrow-minded snake oil sales person into the game.
They declare then that civics takes a back seat to deceptive marketing.
This elevation of suppossed 21st century political and media sophistication to a pedestal defined by 30-second messaging is a sacrament of worship that will not make us a better nor wiser society.
That is what "the point" is.
This guy Davis produces an insulting piece of ad-trash that assumes a tremendous stupidity and gullibility of voters
- an ad that lowered the civic standard in an entire state
- and calls it a meaningful piece about judgment.
It was a meaningful piece about judgment .... his employer's Mrs. Dole's.
There has to be a more honest living than being a professional manipulator.
