The flirting in this Super Bowl spot takes it from lame demagoguery to inexplicable creepiness:
by Chris Bodenner
The ad is predictably pissing people off:
The spot has already invited a barrage of negative reactions, from a coalition of black ministers in Detroit ("The Asian woman speaking in this video would be no different than him having a black person speaking in slave dialect") and an Asian-American voting group ("It is very disturbing that Mr. Hoekstra's campaign chose to use harmful negative stereotypes that intrinsically encourage anti-Asian sentiment") to Republican strategist Mike Murphy ("Pete Hoekstra Superbowl TV ad in MI Senate race really, really dumb. I mean really.")
Of all the representations of a Chinese person to make an enemy of the American worker, Hoekstra had to pick a peasant girl? Not a financial tycoon in Shanghai, or a factory owner in Guangzhou? Damn those peasants for trying to escape abject poverty! Fallows provides a keen analysis along those lines:
The ad's words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about — 'Nam!! Of course some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China, or the huge cities that would exemplify Chinese wealth and the country's rise — ie, the subjects of this ad. So why this rural setting? I think it's because it offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.
The Dish 