Obama: “I Will Never Use the Threat of Terrorism To Scare Up Votes”
That statement is in response to Clinton’s fear-mongering “red phone” ad, which is creating a huge stir on Memeorandum.
For those who can’t view videos, it shows a camera panning over sleeping children as the announcer intones, “It’s 3 a.m., 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.”
Obama’s response.
Transcript here. Blogger reaction:
Jonathan Chait at The New Republic:
… The narrator tells us, twice, that “it’s 3:00 AM and your children are asleep” when a call comes to the White House. From this we’re supposed to conclude that we need a Tested and Ready president in Hillary Clinton, who as First Lady was apparently answering these calls, perhaps because her husband was shacked up at the time. Okay, fine.
But isn’t pretty much everybody asleep at 3:00 AM? And what do my kids have to do with it? Sure, the president could get a call about a terrorist cell forming in Pakistan or something, but that isn’t going to effect my kids, or me, in the middle of the night. We can wait until morning to read about it in the news.
The image in the commercial seems to be taken for commercials for home alarms, and it’s pretty effective in that context — exploiting the fear that your kids will be snatched from their beds by burglars while you sleep. As a parent of young kids I get paranoid about this all the time late at night. But the president isn’t going to get a call about burglars in your house, and even if they did, I don’t see how Clinton’s First Lady experience would help her catch them better than Obama.
Justin Gardner at Donklephant:
She’s actually playing on parents’ fears of children dying to win votes. Unbelievable.
[...]
… my answer to the question “Who do you want answering the phone?” is “Not Hillary.”
Hillary Clinton certainly should have known better than to resort to an ad such as this. She should have taken the advice of Bill Clinton while campaigning for John Kerry in 2004:
Now, one of Clinton’s laws of politics is this. If one candidate is trying to scare you and the other one is try get you to think, if one candidate is appealing to your fears and the other one is appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.
The Obama people have already put together a campaign ad responding to Clinton’s. Alex Koppelman has it.
Some bloggers are comparing Clinton’s ad to the famous LBJ “daisy girl” ad from the 1964 race against Barry Goldwater. Joe Gandelman remembers seeing that ad on television the one time it aired, and doesn’t think the Clinton ad comes close in terms of scariness. I saw “daisy girl,” too — I was in ninth grade at the time — and I have to agree with Joe on this point. That ad was terrifying. Doesn’t mean that the Clinton ad isn’t trying to use fear to win votes, which is a despicable and, in Clinton’s case, desperate tactic — and it was a typically brainless move on her part; it’s only going to turn people off. Particularly given Obama’s swift and superbly competent response.
Tags: Kathy
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