Ad quality and quantity do not a presidential candidate qualify.
Common sense dictates Gov. Bill Richardson will have no problem taking his***image1*** home state in the Feb. 5 Democratic primary caucus. And yet, despite the foregone conclusion, SFR blogs his campaign obsessively [
May-Dec. 2007: Sfrblogsbill.blogspot.com
] and the local broadsheets summarize his campaign news almost daily.
How is a "sure thing" still newsworthy? The simple answer: New Mexicans take guilty pride in having a local politician in the national spotlight.
Richardson may go down in history as the "Why Not?" candidate. After all, he has already done the whole US Department of Energy secretary, US representative, United Nations ambassador and Western-state governor things.
Why not
run for president?
For starters, he frequently embarrasses himself. At an LGBT forum, he declared that being gay was a choice ("I fucked up," he later said.) [
There's Something About Bill, Aug. 15: "Choice Words"
]. While addressing union members, he confused the Service Employees International Union with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. And he hesitated in denouncing former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, "because he's Hispanic."
Plus, Richardson is still polling in the single digits in Nevada, the sole Western state with an early primary explicitly designed to empower Hispanic voters, Richardson's target audience [
Cover story, March 21: "Raising Nevada"
]. His small foothold may slip even more as Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and Rep. Barack Obama, D-Ill., begin airing television ads in the Silver State.
***image3***But anything can happen, especially where TV ads are concerned, and media analysts recognize that Richardson has run some of the most clever and powerful commercials in presidential campaign history. Not that New Mexicans would know it; Richardson's commercials have run exclusively in Iowa and New Hampshire.
"We wanted to start off with a more traditional, serious approach, but then follow up with the 'Job Interview' ads," Mark Putnam, the creative director behind Richardson's ads, says. "We knew that the governor has a great sense of humor and is very self-deprecating, so that really led to [the series'] genesis."
Spoofing the media's premature designation of "frontrunner" candidates, the
Office Space
-style ads feature a human-resources manager telling Richardson he's overqualified for the job.
"But you don't want to put all your eggs in the humor basket," Putnam says.
Even Richardson's talking-head ads were innovative. His "The Choice on Iraq" ad features bloggers from
and
. As a result, Richardson became the second-place candidate on the netroots fund-raising site ActBlue.com. (But Richardson's $310,000 is peanuts compared to the $4.3 million ActBlue raised for John Edwards.)
Richardson followed that with a golden oldie: a tear-jerking endorsement from two civilians whose releases from an Iraqi prison Richardson negotiated during the 1991 Gulf War. What viewers aren't told is that one of the men, David Daliberti, passed away in 2003.
Richardson plans to release at least one more ad before the primaries. Mum's the word on the theme, but Putnam says it won't be an attack.
Posterity will remember Richardson's commercials fondly, one connoisseur says.
"If you look back over the history of campaign ads, you don't see a lot of humor," David Schwartz, curator of the Museum of the Moving Image's "Living Room Candidate" archives, says. "I think one reason we're seeing it now has to do with the rise of the Internet…because if you see a funny ad, you're more likely to pass it on to a friend."***image2***
But some analysts say that TV ads generally are not that effective, period.
"They come on and if [viewers] like the program they're watching, they won't change the channel, but they don't pay as much attention to the ad," Bill Benoit, University of Missouri professor and author of several texts on political communication, says. "I think that's one reason ad developers keep trying to be as innovative as they can."
The most that can be said is that without his innovative ads Richardson would be…Sen. Joseph Biden. Even with them, he'll probably still be our governor come 2008.
