I always find the mini history lessons in our class podcast really interesting. I knew that FDR was disabled but I did not know that he went to such great lengths to hide it for fear of public opinion. Furthermore, I had never heard that so much research went into Nixon and Kennedy’s debate. I have also found that when listening to things such as the podcast I am much more focused on the content than when I have watched video lectures for other classes. The visual component can easily distract from interpreting the message and it seems like our brain finds the social and body language cues to be more important.
For the Living Room Candidate assignment I chose the 2008 election because during that election my dad had me help him distribute flyers and campaign door to door for McCain. Like we have mentioned in class and in the podcast, I am sure my dad was attempting to appeal to the instincts of the people he was campaigning to by bringing along a 7 year old. My favorite ad was a really poor quality ad made by McCain’s advertisers that I believe was inspired by Austin Powers. It starts out saying “Barack Obama is Dr. No” while playing cheesy spy music in the background and static black and white images of Obama are shown. While all of the messages that pop up do present Obama’s ideas about different energy sources such as gas taxes and nuclear power, it is clear that the information is skewed as the audio of Obama talking cuts at specific moments. Clearly not all of his ideas were presented in this targeted ad. I have always found it funny that the majority of political campaign ads try to bring down the opposing candidate rather than speak positively about the person who paid for and sponsored the ad.
I completely agree with you – it is sometimes simply amusing how focused they are on tearing down another candidate rather than showing what they stand for. You would think that it would be more effective to simply just distinctly show what you believe and the policies that you want to implement rather than the bad things another candidate has said. Like you mentioned with the McCain ad running against Obama, some of them are just cringeworthy with how poor they are and really just make the candidate look worse as you begin to question the legitimacy and quality of their campaign.
The constant use of attack ads these days is disheartening. What’s especially troubling is that there’s no clear way to buck this trend. If one candidate refrains from using attack ads and their competitors don’t, they risk losing voters. It has become a competition of who can look the least bad.