The Jed Report: McCain ad tweaks colors to highlight 'foreign' smear
MaryE
· 1 year ago
Politico has an aritcle "mccain attacks have Obama raking in the dough" something like that. Let's all donate for every attack we hear on the tv or see on the computer! Keep a running tab - quarters, dimes , dollars. Send it in weekly, monthly. Spread the word! Senator Obama is going to need alot of money after the convention for ads running just about non-stop! 2 full months worth in lots of states. Giving to Obama helps me relieve the anger towards mccain for his filthy, vulgar,sadistic attacks of mockery and derision by mccain's sham of a campaign.
Sage24
· 1 year ago
Finally, when you realize you have nothing different to offer the American people, but failed policies, major deficits, endless wars, then you lower yourself and resort to ugly, dirty, attacks on your opponent. It worked the last two times, so why not use the same bottom feeders, to run dishonest ads and bring your opponent down. These rats are taking advantage of the naive, mindless, Americans, who obviously are ignorant, and make their decisions on these ads. Mad Mac has put aside all his self respect, and is even proud of these tabloid type ads. What does that say about the caliber of his campaign, and the man himself? Well, you get what you vote for, and it looks like America must be ready for another Bush term.
We are gluttons for punishment, no?
TB50
· 1 year ago
Great photograph! Senator Obama looks so handsome in McCain's deceitful, silly advertisements. Pictures often speak louder than the narrative - which is why FOX used younger pictures of the creepy old man. Notice how McCain's closing photograph in his TV adverts crops his baldness in effort to make him look younger?
dkawaii
· 1 year ago
I definitely believe that the intention is to connect Foreign with Obama's face. However, they can say that due to the gradient in the background, used to balance the composition of the frame, the color of the letters were varied as well.
Oh and we didn't mean anything by including two blond women juxtaposed with a black man...
Chris
· 1 year ago
In that Iraq "documentary", didn't McCain show Obama with a "Al Qd" highlighted with Obama's face on it? Isn't this more proof that this is what McCain is trying to do?
Lee2008
· 1 year ago
I find this revelation startling. This will cause me to look at these commercials with closer examination. The McCain campaign is working with professional advertisers. No novice person would know to do this.
DiegoUK
· 1 year ago
Welcome back :¬) Deb did a great job, I like his articles
Kane from Florida
· 1 year ago
I think the Obama camp should push the notion that Obama isn’t the real celebrity. The Democratic Party is the celebrity. Hillary, John Edwards and many of the other candidates would be drawing similar crowds and generating much of the same excitement as Obama.
Don’t get me wrong, Obama has a solid blueprint of how he wants to change the direction of the country, he also has a presence, a way of exciting people and a level of charisma that turns up the volume quite a few notches, so none of them would have equaled his support and excitement.
However, the war in Iraq, the bad economy, and the resentment against the George Bush years made it very easy for the Democratic Party to mobilize and for just about any nominee to be treated somewhat like a rock star at home and abroad.
The RNC wants to try to turn the excitement about the Democratic Party and Obama into a negative because that’s all they have to work with. The RNC is tarnished so the only thing they can do is try and take away their opponents strength and turn it into a weakness.
We saw it during the primaries when the Clinton camp accused Obama of plagiarism in order to cast doubt about his more superior oratorical skills and they also made light of Obama’s big events, lofty speeches and excited crowds. It didn’t work for Clinton but I guess the McCain camp didn’t get the memo because they’re revisiting the same failed strategy.
I mean, to try and blame someone for being popular is like blaming someone for being wealthy or for being attractive. It is what it is. Obama can’t control how many people show up at his events, just like McCain can’t control how many people show up at his (or don’t show up).
I think George Bush senior summed it up when a reporter asked him, while golfing with McCain, how he felt about all the excitement Obama was getting overseas. Bush senior flatly stated “jealousy is the first word to come to mind” and McCain let out a big smile. The RNC is jealous of Obama’s attention and like a jilted lover they’ve resulted to juvenile tactics that resemble something like keying Obama’s new car or leaving annoying messages on his voice mail.
plainbrown1
· 1 year ago
For reasons I cannot intuit, the MSM seems to think that the McCain ads are almost accidental and not the product of careful crafting by experienced marketers. Team McCain has left no trick unused. That is why it is so silly to think that the selection of images in any of his ads, including the Celebrity ad, was coincidental. These folks are sending distinct messages to folks who likely don't even recognize that they are getting them, but planted with some vague discomfort with Obama. Somehow the MSM keeps giving them a pass... which is, I suppose, a testament to their expertise
mypolitics
· 1 year ago
Hope this is not a double post... got error on the first try. The MSM lets John and pud packin' Joe get away with saying this is just injecting a bit of humor in a humorless campaign. GIVE me a BREAK! Of course the foreign was there for the message, I thought so before you showed us the photo shop differences. I am just so sick of the way they let Johns many gaffes slide with barely a word and pick every single sentence of Obama's apart.
Sherman wrote a great article on how John McCain is actually very much like Paris and how disgusting it was to use two white blonds for imagery. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sherman-yellen/se... They had to have realized that Hiltons had maxed out donations to McCain, but decided to use her anyway for maximum message. John is a freakin' joke and if the MSM has their way he will be our next president. It makes me want to scream.
btw welcome back Jed! debrazza nicely kept us from going thru withdrawals while you were away.
Kane from Florida
· 1 year ago
Why the McCain attack ads are not going to work:
1. Attack ads have a positive effect on mobilizing the base of the campaign that is being attacked. Remember that article about McCain possibly having an affair? It came out soon after he became the nominee. Before that article, most of the conservative base had not embraced McCain (some still haven’t). Rush Limbaugh and others were beating up McCain every day. But after that article came out, they circled the wagons and got behind McCain.
These latest attacks on Obama will have a similar effect. Obama supporters are already more excited about their candidate and are willing to actually get involved as well as donate money. So these new line of attacks will take that excitement and wiliness to get involved (and donate) to new levels.
2. There’s also a fatal flaw in McCain’s attack strategy: The McCain attack ads are basically targeted towards undecided voters. However most of the undecided voters are independents and republican defectors; almost everyone else has made up their minds. (Say what you want about the Hillary holdouts, but come Nov 4th they will be punching Obama’s name when they go into the voting booth.)
The fatal flaw in McCain’s attack strategy is that the independent voters and republican defectors are mostly educated voters that are not easily swayed by these baseless and juvenile attacks. Negative ads actually have the opposite effect on educated voters.
They become disillusioned with candidates that can’t seem to convince them of why they should vote for them and instead resort to attacking their opponent. McCain has also brought his character into question and that’s never a good thing. Similar to Custer, this is McCain’s Last Stand. He realizes this is his last shot at the Oval Office so he’s willing to throw the whole kitchen at Obama.
This may be farfetched, but does anyone else feel that the timing of these new attacks seem to coincide with McCain’s cancer scare. Was the biopsy really negative? If it was positive, would they have revealed it? Lately, McCain seems to have taken a “I no longer give a damn what people think about me” attitude.
That’s not the type of attitude you would expect from a politician that believe they still have a political career. It wouldn’t surprise me if McCain’s cancer is back and they want to try and beat up Obama as much as possible before McCain drops out of the race. Then next candidate can simply say, “it wasn’t me”.
dkawaii
· 1 year ago
Cancer or not, McCain resorting to this stuff so early is weird. Maybe, they will select someone else at the convention...
Aor
· 1 year ago
Perhaps McCain isn't as evil as all that. Maybe he is hiring the evil liars to be on his campaign, knowing he can never win, in order to expose his own employees as deceitful manipulators and thus cost them their careers which would potentially result in cleaner elections in the future.
Or, he's an asshole who hires assholes.
Parents of Barack
· 1 year ago
how about the designer wanted the words to blend better with the background so he used different font colors based on the lighting of the background image.
chris morgan
· 1 year ago
And McSame's ad men didn't choose the background too? They only had like a trillion images of Obama to choose from for this, so of course it was all just an innocent mistake. Nevermind everything else in the ad, or that the supposed premise is that a law school professor is stupid, or excuse me 'vacuous'. Pull the other one.
commenter
· 1 year ago
We need to get this out into the media...imagine of this were being done to a Republican, the right wing noise machine would have this hit every major media outlet.
Also, we need to get mad as hell. We need to do everything we can and contribute everything we can to defeat this evil, small man who would follow in Bush's footsteps.
I think one reason why the Republicans are trying to so hard to win is because people like Rove are scared of being prosecuted for all their crimes once they no longer has the White House protecting them. A President Obama will offer them no more executive privilege, but McCain would. In fact, McCain would pardon Rove and others.
Nick
· 1 year ago
There is one problem with this argument. The screenshot referenced above comes during the transition, as the words fade onto the screen. During this the text is partially transparent and since the background behind "oil" is darker than the background behind "foreign" the text appears darker in that frame. I took my own screenshot and opened it in Photoshop. I found that the colors differed in darkness by less than one percent, with "foreign" actually being darker. This can likely be attributed to the compression YouTube uses. Thus, this is just a side effect of a common video editing method, rather than any kind of hidden message.
Mary
· 1 year ago
McCain ,God has Senator Obama "s back. Who has yours ( the Repulican goons) The Jim Crow scare tactics will be destroyed. Obama will be the next President of The United States of America!!!!!!
Laurie Fendrich
· 1 year ago
This is an excellent analysis. I am a blogger for The Chronicle Review, and I blogged on a parallel topic a few days ago:
Yes Chris, they did choose the background. They designed the ad as a video. If you watch actual add, you will notice that the fade is too fast to notice any difference in color and while the text is on the screen the color is consistent. As a professional video editor, I can attest that ad designers pay close attention to the details. But they made a TV add and intended it to be viewed as such. Video is a form of art and analysts can always find interpretations that the artist may or may not have intended. When viewed out of the context the artists intended, it is easy to find your own meaning. Watch the video yourself and see if you can detect the color difference. If you can't when you know it is supposedly there, how is the average viewer supposed to notice it?
Skteoivtehr
· 1 year ago
This is really intolerable. Can't wait for November, for McCain's sake--so his campaign can finally be put out of its misery. The captain needs to retire.
b kenneth mcgee
· 1 year ago
Thre zae no mistakes in these ads. Subliminal directs the message. We may find out in November that the "downscale uneducated voter" is a much larger percentage of our population than we ever imagined. God help us.
All Comments
We are gluttons for punishment, no?
Oh and we didn't mean anything by including two blond women juxtaposed with a black man...
Don’t get me wrong, Obama has a solid blueprint of how he wants to change the direction of the country, he also has a presence, a way of exciting people and a level of charisma that turns up the volume quite a few notches, so none of them would have equaled his support and excitement.
However, the war in Iraq, the bad economy, and the resentment against the George Bush years made it very easy for the Democratic Party to mobilize and for just about any nominee to be treated somewhat like a rock star at home and abroad.
The RNC wants to try to turn the excitement about the Democratic Party and Obama into a negative because that’s all they have to work with. The RNC is tarnished so the only thing they can do is try and take away their opponents strength and turn it into a weakness.
We saw it during the primaries when the Clinton camp accused Obama of plagiarism in order to cast doubt about his more superior oratorical skills and they also made light of Obama’s big events, lofty speeches and excited crowds. It didn’t work for Clinton but I guess the McCain camp didn’t get the memo because they’re revisiting the same failed strategy.
I mean, to try and blame someone for being popular is like blaming someone for being wealthy or for being attractive. It is what it is. Obama can’t control how many people show up at his events, just like McCain can’t control how many people show up at his (or don’t show up).
I think George Bush senior summed it up when a reporter asked him, while golfing with McCain, how he felt about all the excitement Obama was getting overseas. Bush senior flatly stated “jealousy is the first word to come to mind” and McCain let out a big smile. The RNC is jealous of Obama’s attention and like a jilted lover they’ve resulted to juvenile tactics that resemble something like keying Obama’s new car or leaving annoying messages on his voice mail.
Sherman wrote a great article on how John McCain is actually very much like Paris and how disgusting it was to use two white blonds for imagery. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sherman-yellen/se... They had to have realized that Hiltons had maxed out donations to McCain, but decided to use her anyway for maximum message. John is a freakin' joke and if the MSM has their way he will be our next president. It makes me want to scream.
btw welcome back Jed! debrazza nicely kept us from going thru withdrawals while you were away.
1. Attack ads have a positive effect on mobilizing the base of the campaign that is being attacked. Remember that article about McCain possibly having an affair? It came out soon after he became the nominee. Before that article, most of the conservative base had not embraced McCain (some still haven’t). Rush Limbaugh and others were beating up McCain every day. But after that article came out, they circled the wagons and got behind McCain.
These latest attacks on Obama will have a similar effect. Obama supporters are already more excited about their candidate and are willing to actually get involved as well as donate money. So these new line of attacks will take that excitement and wiliness to get involved (and donate) to new levels.
2. There’s also a fatal flaw in McCain’s attack strategy: The McCain attack ads are basically targeted towards undecided voters. However most of the undecided voters are independents and republican defectors; almost everyone else has made up their minds. (Say what you want about the Hillary holdouts, but come Nov 4th they will be punching Obama’s name when they go into the voting booth.)
The fatal flaw in McCain’s attack strategy is that the independent voters and republican defectors are mostly educated voters that are not easily swayed by these baseless and juvenile attacks. Negative ads actually have the opposite effect on educated voters.
They become disillusioned with candidates that can’t seem to convince them of why they should vote for them and instead resort to attacking their opponent. McCain has also brought his character into question and that’s never a good thing. Similar to Custer, this is McCain’s Last Stand. He realizes this is his last shot at the Oval Office so he’s willing to throw the whole kitchen at Obama.
This may be farfetched, but does anyone else feel that the timing of these new attacks seem to coincide with McCain’s cancer scare. Was the biopsy really negative? If it was positive, would they have revealed it? Lately, McCain seems to have taken a “I no longer give a damn what people think about me” attitude.
That’s not the type of attitude you would expect from a politician that believe they still have a political career. It wouldn’t surprise me if McCain’s cancer is back and they want to try and beat up Obama as much as possible before McCain drops out of the race. Then next candidate can simply say, “it wasn’t me”.
Or, he's an asshole who hires assholes.
Also, we need to get mad as hell. We need to do everything we can and contribute everything we can to defeat this evil, small man who would follow in Bush's footsteps.
I think one reason why the Republicans are trying to so hard to win is because people like Rove are scared of being prosecuted for all their crimes once they no longer has the White House protecting them. A President Obama will offer them no more executive privilege, but McCain would. In fact, McCain would pardon Rove and others.
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/fendrich...