Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

This, on the other hand, is a pretty good ad:

This one is pretty good too, although not as good as Steele’s anti-scare tactics ad.

There’s something funny going on in Connecticut. The polls show Lieberman is ahead of Lamont — either a lot or some, but more than a little. But Lieberman is having some kind of personal meltdown. He’s running around contradicting himself in ways that are transparently obvious, trivially easy to show they are contradictory to what he said sometimes only days earlier. For example about Rumsfeld (total about face), about his position on the Hastert investigation. And then there’s his yukfest about torturing Democrats.

Is it panic? Denial? Contempt for the voter? I have no idea. Maybe it has something to do with this:

Jim Web has a new ad today, half attack ad on Allen, quarter defense, quarter pander-positive.

It’s ok, but it’s not as good as I’d wish it to be. Too many messages, production values only get a B, and I can’t see it closing a sale. Not to mention there’s pretty little of the actual candidate in it and he looks like a waxy automaton.

The Washington Post’s Marc Fischer thinks George Allen’s latest commercial is economical with the truth: George Allen’s Zen Ad: Can You Be Misquoted If You Were Never Quoted? It’s a nasty ad, and might be effective unless the counter-story gets out. An example of how money can tell in the last weeks of a campaign.

Incidentally, a commentator on Fischer’s blog has a real zinger: Senator Allen “isn’t so much an empty suit, as an empty sheet.”

The real question is whether Webb’s lawyers are going to ask stations to take down the ad on the grounds that it is simply false. Not that half of them would care. (I see that the DSCC has issued a press release, but that’s not the same thing.)