Some readers are enthusiastic:
My outloud words were "Ah he is fucking fantastic"! GREAT IDEA.
Others less so:
I’m unclear how encouraging viral ads to go negative "pre-empts" the professionals from using the same ideas. Surely you are giving them those ideas, and how to execute them, as a gift.
The idea of a competition seems to me to be based on a fallacy; the mass audience and the audience for home-made political ads on YouTube are just not the same. Now, you may be thinking: this isn’t about the mass audience. It’s the pundit class that I want to influence here; surely it’s worth tiring them of negative ads ahead of time? I would suggest that bombarding the Net audience with negative ads will only accustom them to constant negativity, so they’re no longer offended when the pros do it. So there’ll be fewer protests and less fallout for the perpetrators. The lingering feeling some of us have that such ads are wrong is about all we have to oppose them with, since negativity can be so successful. Do we really want to erode that feeling?
Another writes:
I understand your concept, but it’s a lot like trying to take the power out of offensive words like "queer" and "nigger" by having people repeat them over and over in everyday conversation.
That might work eventually but it takes years to accomplish. You propose we flood the netwaves with the equivalent of "queer" and "nigger" in a short 6 weeks and hope it has a positive effect. I don’t think so. It will only muddy the already murky waters, and I think the net effect (no pun intended) is that some of the more odious ones produced will get passed around the internet and be misunderestimated by a lot of voters who don’t have the ability to separate fact from fiction.
I see the risks. But let’s say we find a brilliant ad that uses the race card against Obama. If and when the McCain campaign copies that, we can better show how these things are done and demystify and defuse the impact. I think of it as a form of vaccination against the disease. The same would hold for an anti-McCain ad that subtly uses the age issue. The ads would be subject to discussion and debate on the blog as we post them. More important, it’s empowering. We are too much in fear of these things. More daylight, more ownership and their impact can be dulled, even subverted.
That’s the idea, anyway. No idea if it will work. It will take effort to do it, more than most people with jobs and families and lives have. But nothing ventured … I’ll keep you posted on the responses.
The Dish 