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Archive for the 'Hillary Clinton' Category

More of Romney, Less of You

Published by William Beutler on October 8, 2008 in Barack Obama, Democrats, E-mail, Fundraising, Hillary Clinton, Internecine Battles, Joe Biden, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Sarah Palin, White House '08 and William Beutler. 6 Comments

We’re now in the final thirty days of an election cycle that began nearly two years ago, and while many think they already know how it will end, no partisan operative can afford to think that way. What happens in the next four weeks will determine the outcome of the next four years, so everyone on each side is pulling as hard as they can in the direction of their party’s candidate… right?

I thought so, until this dropped into my inbox a few hours ago:

Wow, Limited Edition Fleece Blanket? This must be my lucky day!

Seriously, what on Earth is Mitt Romney doing asking Republicans, who could give money to John McCain’s campaign the RNC, to give it to himself instead? If you’re a committed Republican, what’s the most responsible thing to do in the next few weeks: Give money to put television ads on the air in Michigan Iowa, or add this comfy blanket with snazzy carrying straps to your collection of campaign-branded political paraphernalia?

But wait, it gets better. Did you see the last line of the e-mail in the image above? Here it is again, for those of you who dislike squinting:

It is more essential than ever that conservative candidates and organizations have the resources they need to get their message out to voters, and that is why I am writing to you today.

I think we can safely consider this Romney’s retaliation against McCain for picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Updated, minutes later: Wow, what timing — as I was writing this very post, another e-mail landed in my Gmail account. And it looks like someone else had the same idea:

What’s her excuse? Romney did it first?

P.S. At least Romney got a crummy, non-prime time speaking slot at the RNC. Hillary can’t say that.

Open Left and MyDD, One Year Later

Published by William Beutler on July 11, 2008 in Barack Obama, Charts and Graphs, Hillary Clinton, Netroots, Site Traffic, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

This week marks the one-year anniversary for Open Left, a spinoff of the original netroots blog, MyDD. As far as I can tell, the date was not observed on the site itself, but then Chris Bowers, Matt Stoller and the rest are busy running a political website. Blog P.I. though is pretty much just about political websites, so I thought it would be interesting to compare Open Left with MyDD, and see how the two sites have fared in the year since they went in different directions. Via Compete:

Open Left and MyDD site traffic comparison via Compete.com

Here’s how I’m reading this: Open Left had a strong first two months, rising quickly to match the long-running MyDD in overall traffic. Yet MyDD’s traffic was only slightly affected, if at all. How could this be? Naturally, site traffic isn’t a zero sum game, and it’s probable that a reader of one is a reader of both. But it took Open Left a bit of time to pick up readers, while I’ve long been of the belief that as long as MyDD adequately covers its subject matter, Democratic campaign and Hill staffers will never remove it from their bookmarks.

Then MyDD achieved some separation in the fall, which initially I’d attribute to growing interest in the presidential contest. One of the main reasons Bowers and Stoller left was to focus on the progressive movement writ large, rather than the horse race — so it is understandable that it would not be the go-to site in the heat of the primaries. And then starting in December, MyDD really began to take off. While some of this is probably attributable to still more interest in the nominating contest, I’d wager the sharp spike owes to site founder Jerome Armstrong (along with Bowers/Stoller replacement Todd Beeton) taking the site in a strong pro-Clinton direction. This distinguished it from most lefty blogs, which ranged from avidly pro-Obama to mildly pro-Obama (as I’ve discussed before, Open Left was at best tepidly pro-Obama).

Odd, then, that interest peaked in late January/early February, as the nominating contest was only just getting under way. Open Left suffered a drop in traffic around this time as well, suggesting a broader trend. Traffic slowing just when things got interesting? Maybe it is more interesting to the outside observer, where the same thing is frustrating to partisans who expected to have a nominee. And then as Obama inched closer to the nomination, the interest of Clinton supporters remained flat, while the leftosphere overall turned to matters of organization rather than elections. This part, I concede, is the most speculative; I admit to being a little baffled by this section of the chart.

And now? Well, the last month shows another slip in traffic for both, with MyDD staying slightly ahead. I wouldn’t be surprised if this continued for another month. August is slow in politics, even in election years, and even in the blogosphere.

But it seems clear that despite being an expansion team, Open Left is in the same league as MyDD. Then again, it seems no matter how big you get, there’s always someone bigger than you:

Firedoglake, bigger than MyDD and Open Left, via Compete.com

Cerf’s Up: When Bipartisanship Really Isn’t

Published by William Beutler on June 30, 2008 in #pdf2008, Blog Consultants, Blog Fights, Democrats, Fundraising, Google, Hillary Clinton, Lobbying, Tech Blogosphere, Virginia Politics, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

At last week’s Personal Democracy Forum, one of the events I missed was the launch of a coalition called InternetforEveryone.org. I’m skeptical of the organization, and while I admit I’m not really sure what it’s all about, therein lies part of my skepticism. It’s very easy to agree that Internet access should be as widely available as possible. However, the policy details are not so easily agreed upon. But as a market-oriented thinker, I’m inclined to agree with Erick Erickson that this is in fact a bad idea.

Supporters at the press conference included Stanford professor Larry Lessig, former FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, environmental activist Van Jones, a venture capitalist from the firm which first funded Twitter, Google’s chief evangelist Vint Cerf and Josh Silver from Free Press. That’s the same Josh Silver I criticized back in May for claiming the only real news was his kind of news.

Also on the panel: Republican consultant David All, whom I count as a friend and whose work on Slatecard I admire but with whom I disagree on some matters of policy and partisanship. I’m not the first to note the incongruity of this panel; if you happened to check out the comments at All’s TechRepublican starting this weekend, Mike Turk initiated a very interesting debate with All on the merits of the group continuing through today.

David has called Internet for Everyone a “bipartisan” organization, which Turk has also called into question. All’s claim seems very hard to justify, based on the names above. For one thing, the only other reference to Internet for Everyone as “bi-partisan” comes from Brian Reich at Fast Company — who is, coincidentally, a former Gore campaign aide. Meanwhile Tim Karr of Free Press didn’t bother to include the word “bipartisan” in his announcement at Huffington Post.

But I was reminded of a tweet from @DavidAll the evening the conference ended:

David All tweet about Vint Cerf as a Republican

And in a post on Saturday, All did concede that the bipartisanship of the group was tenuous:

As one of the only Republicans in the coalition (Vint Cerf of Google is a registered Republican), I believe it’s crucial for Republicans to embrace a national broadband strategy.

Curious about Vint Cerf’s Republican bona fides, I decided to punch his name into OpenSecrets.org. For the sake of column width, I’ve removed his employers (principally MCI, MCI Worldcom, Worldcom and Google). Here’s what I found:

Vint Cerf’s political donations, via OpenSecrets.org

Finally! Proof that Vint Cerf is a Republican. Well, maybe he was once a Republican. And so, David’s claim that the Internet was Republican from the beginning has a fighting chance. But Cerf is clearly not a Republican now, in fact he has been quite an active Democrat since approximately the Reagan administration.

There are certainly times when cross-ideological partnerships are a good idea, such as when Redstate’s Mike Krempasky, Adam Bonin and Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos came together to fend off campaign finance restrictions on bloggers. But it concerns me that David All — one of the C&E-recognized rising stars of GOP Washington — is giving ideological cover to an organization which is not just non-conservative and not just un-conservative, but whose basic idea treats limited government and market-based solutions as beneath discussion.

P.S. I hope this doesn’t dissuade him from watching the rest of The Wire.

Hillary Needs Me (And You)

Published by William Beutler on June 25, 2008 in #pdf2008, E-mail, Fundraising, Hillary Clinton, Online Fundraising, White House '08, White House '12 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

My last post, written from an auditorium on the fifth floor of the AOL Time Warner Center, was a little on the snarky side about the fact that two weeks after the formal suspension of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, she is still sending e-mails to her massive list.

Hillary’s third e-mail since leaving the raceLater in the day, I attended a panel discussion with my colleague Soren Dayton and Peter Daou, who still remains Senator Clinton’s Internet advisor. Afterward I spoke with Daou briefly, and I mentioned the post and asked him about their e-mail plans. He confirmed that they indeed planned to continue sending e-mails to the list.

They didn’t wait long.

At right is the image from an e-mail I received late this morning. Not surprisingly, it’s an appeal for help paying down the campaign’s debt — about $22 million, $12 million of which she loaned herself. So I expect I’ll be getting more than a few of these over the coming weeks. But I promise I’ll only write about it again if it’s really interesting.

P.S. One more shout-out to Daou for helping me write Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, The Netroots and Peter Daou upon the campaign’s official launch January 2007. Yes it made him look good, but as a senior-level staffer of the front-running Democratic candidate, he was certainly under no obligation to speak with a right-of-center blogger about the campaign.

Hillary is Stalking Me

Published by William Beutler on June 23, 2008 in #pdf2008, E-mail, Hillary Clinton, White House '08 and White House '12. 1 Comment

As I’m sitting here in the Rose Theater at PDF, working on a longer post about the day’s cacophony, what arrives in my inbox but this:

June 23 e-mail from Hillary for President

This is the second e-mail I’ve received from “Hillary for President” since she announced her (reluctant?) support for Barack Obama. Here’s the other one, which arrived almost exactly a week ago:

June 16 e-mail from Hillary for President

Well, I suppose she did give fair warning. But does this mean I’ll get an e-mail from her every week from now until the convention? Until the election? And will they have the same aspirational banner across the top?

Alternatively, is this the true end of the Hillary campaign — not with a bang, but with a whimper; not with a speech, but with an e-mail? I guess we’ll find out.

Four Blogs, Two Candidates and One Year Later

Published by William Beutler on May 7, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Daily Kos, Defections, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Instapundit, John Edwards, John McCain, Netroots, Online Fundraising, Primary fights, White House '08, White House '12 and William Beutler. Closed

Balloon Juice, The Daily Dish, MyDD and Taylor Marsh

Three’s a trend, and this is Blog P.I.’s third post in a row leaning on juxtapositions; this time, the subject of two posts from late 2006 and early 2007 have converged in a way I certainly couldn’t have imagined at the time. Both were about bloggers’ attitudes toward the presidential campaign then still taking shape, and if one can make any definitive predictions in politics, it’s that you can never make definitive predictions about the future. And this is all the more true on the morning after the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.

  • In October ‘06 it was The Agony and the Apostasy, about the leftward drift of two well-known (onetime) conservative bloggers, Andrew Sullivan and John Cole. Sullivan claims to believe everything today that he believed in the early 2000s, but the day-to-day effect of his blogging is pretty much the opposite. Cole has gone from a Republican supporter of the Iraq war to a sarcastic critic of all things Republican.
  • Then in January 2007, Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, the Netroots and Peter Daou, a lengthy reported piece about the Internet advertising campaign directed by Daou, coinciding with the official launch of Clinton’s presidential bid. That post also explored Nevada blogger Taylor Marsh’s incensed reaction to being excluded from the original ad buy. This post also referred to MyDD as “one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left.”

So how much does a year change? Quite a bit. The 2006 post wondered about which way the two apostates would break in the 2008 race:

It seems plausible that Sullivan and Cole could support a Republican for president alongside their erstwhile compatriots, but probably not until after the primary is decided.

My answer, hedging as it was, does not seem to have stood the test of time.

  • In the year and a half since, Sullivan has moved his blog from Time to The Atlantic and, in concert with his recent criticism of the Republican Party and conservative movement overall, he has become one of the most prominent supporters of Barack Obama. So much so that The Atlantic published a December cover essay by Sullivan presumptuously titled “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.” On the Republican side, Sullivan had preferred McCain over the runners-up, in large part based on McCain’s opposition to the Bush administration’s torture/interrogation policies. Of course, Obama holds the same opinion. Sullivan was no doubt pleased with last night’s results in North Carolina and Indiana, but one cannot escape the sense that he’ll miss the Clintons.
  • Cole, meanwhile, has become an even more constant, if not more ardent, supporter of Obama’s candidacy. Like Sullivan a former 1990s conservative, he acquired no later appreciation for Hillary Clinton. And like Sullivan, he now sees her worse attributes similar to what he doesn’t like about the modern Republican party. He remains a member of the Pajamas Media advertising network which is run and largely populated by right-of-center blogs such as Instapundit and Protein Wisdom. But now he’s also been using the Democrat-oriented ActBlue website to raise money for Obama (and Obama alone) which probably makes him the only blog simultaneously affiliated with both Pajamas Media and ActBlue. As for the primary results, Cole was exultant, apparently staying up most of the night blogging the results.

Clearly, neither are rejoining the Republican camp anytime soon. More interesting, though, is what’s happened with Taylor Marsh and MyDD.

  • At the time, Marsh was leaning strongly toward Edwards and was unimpressed by Clinton. But regardless of her displeasure with the Clinton campaign’s ad buy, barely two months later she had changed her mind and made the case for Clinton. Even before then, her site had started to turn anti-Obama, especially after he dissed her home state by skipping an AFSCME-sponsored presidential forum in Carson City. Since then, she has been one of the most ardent pro-Clinton bloggers and one of the most committed Democratic opponents of Obama. And only just this morning, with the primary results clear, is Marsh shifting again: recognizing that Clinton cannot win, she will oppose John McCain without making the case for Obama.
  • Meantime, MyDD has undergone even bigger changes than the other three. In this case it wasn’t a change of mind, but a change of bloggers: in July of last year, the two principal authors, Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, decamped for an entirely new website: Open Left. Their new blog has now become a new leading anti-Hillary site, as MyDD once was. Meanwhile, MyDD has shifted back to reflecting the opinion of the site’s original founder, Jerome Armstrong. Armstrong stepped up his own blogging and brought in a new contributor, pro-Hillary Todd Beeton. Armstrong had previously been a consultant to Mark Warner, former governor of (and all-but-guaranteed future senator from) Virginia, but since he exited the presidential race more than a year ago, Armstrong has become an unflinching proponent of Hillary Clinton. So much so, in fact, that it has been the source of conflict between Armstrong and his former co-author Markos Moulitsas, to say nothing of the wider leftosphere. Today, Armstrong is sounding a little more apathetic than Marsh, merely affirming that the Clinton campaign has the right to continue on.

Taken as a whole, the four websites defy categorization, dissimilar in cause and effect, except in that their content has changed dramatically over time. And I am sure that whether McCain or Obama takes the oath of office next January, I don’t want to make any predictions about which candidates each site will be supporting in 2012.

The Tale of the E-mail

Published by William Beutler on May 7, 2008 in Barack Obama, Democrats, E-mail, Election Night, Hillary Clinton, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

I’m not sure if interesting juxtapositions will be a trend here at Blog P.I., but here’s another: this time, the tell-tale campaign e-mails from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, sent out in the early morning hours.

From Team HRC, arriving in my inbox at 12:26 a.m.:

Hillary Clinton’s post Indiana and North Carolina campaign e-mail

Tonight’s victory in Indiana was close, and a margin that narrow means just one thing: every single thing you did to help us win in Indiana helped make the difference.

Every call you made, every friend you spoke to about our campaign, every dollar you contributed made tonight’s victory possible. And I couldn’t be more thankful for your hard work.

Every time we’ve celebrated a victory, we’ve celebrated it together. And tonight is no exception. This victory is your victory, this campaign is your campaign, and your support has been the difference between winning and losing.

Thank you so much for making this campaign possible. Let’s keep making history together.

And from Team BHO, arriving at 12:51 a.m.:

Barack Obama’s post Indiana and North Carolina campaign e-mail

We just won a decisive victory in North Carolina thanks to people like you.

Indiana remains too close to call. But what is clear is that we did much better than all the pundits predicted, despite Republicans changing parties to support Senator Clinton, believing she would be easier for Senator McCain to defeat.

Here’s where we stand.

As of Tuesday morning, we needed just 273 delegates to clinch the nomination. When the votes are fully counted Wednesday morning, we will have gained more than a third of them in a single day.

We have a clear path to victory. But now is the time for each one of us to step up and do what we can to close out this primary.

Please make a donation of $25 right now:

https://donate.barackobama.com/results

Thank you for everything you’re doing,

It doesn’t take a sophisticated campaign observer to notice the tonal difference in those letters. Obama scored a big North Carolina victory, and even sort of rescinds his victory speech congratulations to Clinton for taking Indiana. And like her just-barely-a-victory speech last night, Hillary’s e-mail does not declare the Indiana win as signifying anything except her supporters are to be commended. The writing is on the wall; or as the case may be, in her supporters’ e-mail inboxes.

That’s What FriendFeeds Are For

Published by William Beutler on April 22, 2008 in Barack Obama, Fred Thompson, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Online Campaigns, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web video, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

As I am frequently given to blogging about the first thing I see in my e-mail box each morning, and commenting on the extremely limited tools on John McCain’s campaign website, here the twain meet. This morning I woke up to find John McCain, or someone using his name, had subscribed to my FriendFeed account:

John McCain joins FriendFeed

FriendFeed is one of the more recent Web 2.0 services on the scene, and some believe it could be the latest next big thing.
Considering the McCain campaign’s sometimes uneven online strategy, this is a step in the right direction. It’s better to send your campaign out into the places where people are than to expect them to come to you, anyway. So, I subscribed in return:

Subscribing to John McCain’s FriendFeed

And it’s the campaign, all right — the favorited video indeed shows up on the official McCain YouTube channel as the most recently favorited video.

Better still, the favorited video was uploaded by McCain Girls, the parodic creation of left-leaning humor website 23/6. Sure, the joke may be on McCain, but the McCain campaign is willing to laugh along with the joke. The video favorited is of McCain literally laughing along with it.

Obama, of course, is on FriendFeed as well. He also has more online content piped through it: Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. McCain’s camp only lists the official blog’s RSS feed and YouTube account.

I know that’s not all they’re doing. McCain is on LinkedIn; earlier this month the campaign made clever use of the surprisingly resilient socnet, asking a question of the site’s memebers and receiving more than 3,000 responses.

John McCain on LinkedIn

I’m a bit surprised that McCain’s camp appears not to be using Flickr. Surely someone is taking pictures; during the Fred Thompson campaign we kept the Flickr account updated constantly with photographs taken by Thompson family friend Jim Rydell. (We released all photos under a Creative Commons license, thus providing quality photos of Thompson that supporters could use.)

McCain doesn’t appear to be using Twitter at either likely account (here or here), though supporters are giving the campaign a presence (here and here) on the increasingly zeitgeisty socnet.
McCain’s camp did create an account on Digg, but they haven’t used the account since late last year.

Maybe all of this is not crucial, but the more social networks a campaign uses, the likelier it is they will reach people they would not have otherwise. Democrats will do all they can to portray McCain as old and out of touch, so presenting him well him to the young and with-it denizens of these online communities should take on added importance. Meanwhile, fundraising seems to be improving a bit, so maybe Pat Hynes will get a few extra hands to take care of these things.

Twitter Spam Gets Political

Published by William Beutler on April 1, 2008 in Hillary Clinton, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0, White House '08 and William Beutler. 6 Comments

Last week, Mashable’s Adam Ostrow asked whether Twitter was facing a spam problem. I said it already does. Ostrow pointed to a Twitter account that seemed to be following far more people than anyone could know, and for purely promotional purposes.

As of today, that account follows (i.e. has friended) 13,000+ Twitterinos, only to tweet links to images of ho-hum abstract artwork. Amazingly, more than 800 people are still following this account. Shortly before reading his post, I found a teenager in Norway who seemed to be doing something similar. While he may in fact be using the service genuinely, he too was following thousands before he’d posted a single tweet. Today he’s following some 3,700+ others, but hasn’t updated for two days, when he was:

watching random crap on youtube :) — Flyaxe on Twitter

Now Twitter spam has taken a turn for the political. On Sunday, CQ’s Eric Pfeiffer told me that his account (which he updates only sporadically) had recently been followed by a horde of obviously fake accounts named for a current or former presidential candidate, plus a number. Most of the notification e-mails he had already deleted, but the others he forwarded to me. They are… interesting. For example, here’s the latest tweet from ChrisDodd53:

Twitter spammer rips off techPresident Daily Digest

I think we can safely assume there are not 52 other Chris Dodds on Twitter. But did you recognize the content of that tweet? I sure did: it was scraped from today’s techPresident Daily Digest. And this pattern is repeated across all the examples of spam accounts he sent my way.

Herewith, a list of these accounts, and a link to the blog whence its latest tweet was scraped:

You know, if these were simply attached to RSS feeds and genuine aggregators of political news, I wouldn’t mind so much. Yes, the aggressive, untargeted following is certainly annoying. But these accounts do not drive traffic to the sites where the words originated. This also makes the creator’s intent all the more inscrutable; they aren’t saying anything, they aren’t promoting anything, and they aren’t updated by hand. The only thing it’s good for, maybe, is souring users on Twitter. But I don’t believe Pownce or Google/Jaiku are really that underhanded. So I remain mystified.

Whatever the cause, this must stop. And it can. Unlike e-mail, which is traded from network to network across yon Internets around the globe, Twitter is administered entirely by Obvious, LLC. They have the same control over the Twitter network as Facebook has over its pages, and it’s within their power to stop it. I’ve previously suggested capping the number of users you can follow, relative to the number of users who are following you. Nothing too restrictive, but something flexible to keep Twitter accounts honest. Jack? Biz? Ev? Little help over here?

In the meantime, there is is already a website carrying the banner against this annoying menace. That’s Stop Twitter Spam, which is currently tracking complaints about spam on Twitter, including my post from last week. The site only barely gets into solutions, and mostly serves to highlight the problem. Most interesting of all is the Twitter Spammer List.

This list includes most of the candidate-based accounts I’ve noted here, and some others I hadn’t. It also mentions the examples from last week, but separates them into two apparent categories of problem Twitter accounts: outright spam and overactive followers. It also notes the number of follows vs. the number of followers and shows the difference as a ratio. The greatest disparity is HillaryClinton5. When the list was last updated, the account followed 2905 others, yet only 25 others followed “her” back. It’s not that HillaryClinton5 has friended the most people — that’s probably the design/art company mentioned above — but that she has the fewest followers. These numbers are a few days out of date, but still give a useful snapshot of the problem.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit nostalgic for the days when Brian Shaler was just following everybody in sight, like it was a game. But then, Shaler is an honest Twitterino. And almost everyone he follows also follows him back.

It’s 3 A.M. Do You Know Where Your Rhetoric Came From?

Published by William Beutler on February 29, 2008 in Advertising, Barack Obama, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Rhetoric, Television, White House '08 and William Beutler. 4 Comments

This morning First Read covered Hillary Clinton’s last-ditch negative campaign spot, questioning Barack Obama’s readiness for the job of commander-in-chief. Here’s their write-up:

*** Goin’ negative: We were about to write this morning about our surprise that Clinton hasn’t run a negative ad against Obama in either Ohio or Texas. But then we saw the new Clinton ad in Texas that appeared on TODAY. It goes: “It’s 3am and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders…knows the military…someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world. It’s 3am and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” Does it remind anyone of that LBJ Daisy ad? Ok, that’s a little extreme… But it sure does raise the specter of fear.

It’s also being compared to the “red phone” ad Mondale put up against the insurgent Gary Hart in 1984.

But it actually reminded me of something else entirely, and much more recent: a campaign mailer put out by AFSCME in support of Clinton in New Hampshire not two months ago. Politico’s Ben Smith was the first to post it; here it is, cropped for clarity/focus:

Hillary Clinton “warhead” mailer by AFSCME

You could say AFSCME tested the message in a small market before the campaign took it wider. Nothing wrong with that unless it was actually an AFSCME-backed 527, which the campaign would be forbidden from coordinating with. Then again, lifting an argument two months later is hardly a smoking gun.

As to its potency, the AFSCME mailer received a bit of negative coverage in the blogsosphere, but not enough to backfire. This time the stakes are even higher, and the campaign itself is making the risky argument.

If it works, it will no doubt join the ranks of those controversial-but-effective spots (add Reagan’s “Bear in the woods” and 43’s “Wolves” ads in there, too). If it doesn’t, as I expect, it will be quickly forgotten and everyone can get on with blaming Mark Penn for everything.