This is not a diary, so much as it is a request for a diary. As I am — like most of us — just an armchair media analyst, I'd love to hear from somebody who has experience with and knowledge about the process of creating TV ads for major political campaigns.
There's been alot of back and forth about McCain's Obama/Britney/Paris ad, much of it focused on the question of whether it was deliberately racist, accidentally racist, or not racist at all, and on what was "intended" by the campaign in putting out an ad like this. Mr. Marshall has an excellent post on the topic:
But the truth is that when you're trying to understand how race is injected into a political campaign, if you're looking for a physics analogue, it's not Newtonian mechanics but quantum theory. It's not one or the other. Effective messages hit multiple themes, different messages in different people's minds and even read differently on the first or the third reading. So is the Britney ad about emasculating Obama, as Robert George says? Yes. Is it also about simply pairing Obama up with Britney and Paris? Absolutely. It's both. And a lot more. In many cases, this game is simply a matter of taking charged images out into the public consciousness. They don't necessarily 'mean' one thing or another. You just push them out and they take on a life of their own.
In this case, if the point is to say that Obama's a celebrity, how exactly do you get from there to Britney Spears? Paris Hilton? Mull on that for a second. Are those the most logical analogues to Obama? Play it any way you want but somehow at the end of the day we end up with a campaign message based on promoting Obama as a song and dance man and paired with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. How'd we get here? It's the GOP race and sex equivalent of all roads lead to Rome.
Which I agree with, but then again, I know about as much about the actual process of creating a campaign ad as I do about quantum physics, so I really dont know jack.
But surely there's got to be someone on DKos who has worked on a campaign, and has actually sat in on the brainstorming sessions, the crafting of message, the hours in the editing room, and I would love to hear their opinion about these ads, and political ads in general. How much thought goes into them? How much time is spent deliberating on not just the overt message, but the covert messages as well?
Thanks in advance to anyone who steps up :)