Life follows art on the campaign trail
I was highly amused to see a script almost straight out NBC’s The West Wing come to life today. The show followed a Democratic president through six of his eight years in office, which of course included a re-election campaign. On one episode, a vicious attack ad on the president’s opponent, Gov. Ritchie, gets leaked, via convoluted means, to the press. The TV news then shows the ad again and again on the air, and since the ad is so nasty, it provides Ritchie with a big sympathy boost. My point here is that by leaking the ad to the press, the campaign got a commercial into circulation that might have otherwise never seen the light of day, and at no loss of campaign funds.
Now switch to the real-world 2008 Republican primary campaign. Sen. John McCain has apparently been sitting on an anti-Gov. Mitt Romney attack ad for six months, an ad which neatly answers a Romney-produced anti-McCain ad. But the McCain team has been hurting for money. They may not have aired the ad for tactical reasons, but just as likely they didn’t air it because the campaign can’t afford the TV time. So here’s a workaround: leak it to the press. Slate.com‘s John Dickerson wrote a whole story about it, and he posted a video of the ad. That’s buckets of free publicity for McCain, plus they can keep the moral high ground. “We didn’t go negative,” they might say. “We don’t know how Dickerson got that ad. We don’t believe in negative politics,” or some such mummery.
I bet this sort of thing happens every election cycle, but this is the first time I noticed it, so I thought I’d share.
