Politico reported yesterday that a pro-Kamala Harris super PAC, Future Forward, is shelling out $100 million in ads during this last week of the campaign "to broadcast her closing message to voters."
Excellent tidings. Politico described Future Forward's marketing exploit as a "record-breaking messaging deluge" — again superb, uplifting, really tickety-boo news. The ads, continued Politico with some specificity, "lean heavily into voters’ economic concerns and Harris’ effort to contrast her plans to improve people’s lives with those of Donald Trump."
There is room for opposing opinions on any strategy; there's just nothing like healthy debate, genteel agreement to disagree, and old-fashioned sportsmanship in resolutions and rebuttals. That's true in the case of Future Forward's game plan as well, even though its approach is dead wrong and I'm absolutely right.
For too many decades Democratic politicians have stressed policy in campaigns while Republicans blew right by them with impassioned appeals to the emotional gut. Policy is the heart of officeholding, and policy should be at the heart of tub-thumping. It was, once. Voters heatedly debated issues such as abolitionism, silver versus gold, American imperialism, a U.S. central bank — the pros and cons.
Those days are long gone, the fires pissed on, the heat departed. Republicans' introduction of cultural and religious issues into national campaigns — by now, a six-decade partisan obsession — is abhorrent, for sure. Yet we must be realists. This is where we are, and though we'll crawl out of this rabbit hole of irrelevance someday, that day is a distant one.
Meanwhile, however, Democrats persist in stump-chattering about the remarkable, magnificent, ever-so-splendid policies they'll institute once elected. All this goo-goo government yakety-yak they then reinforce in television, radio and digital ads. It's heartwarming and truly impressive but for one little item. Most voters don't give a damn about any of it, assuming they even comprehend it.
And that takes us back to Future Forward's $100 million extravaganza. Rather than warming my heart it breaks it. Politico reports the super PAC is running two versions of the ad, both "focused on helping Americans get ahead." One, called "Plans," argues that "Trump will seek personal revenge" — that part is laudatory — but the rest is devoted to how Harris "fights for you."
The other ad, "Get By," seeks more "Black voters with specific dollar promises on home-buying and small businesses." While Harris has been pushing variants of this line since July, Trump has been increasing his support among Blacks. Does that not suggest a bit of counterproductive head-banging? A portion of the ad will also "make sure to needle Trump’s viral 'Black jobs' comment." Needle. That's it?
Tell me they're joking. Tell me Politico has it all wrong. Or in the name of God someone please tell me that both ads will be taken down, refitted overnight and re-devoted to airing every vile, vindictive, malign remark Trump has made about all minority groups, women, the rule of law, nonChristian-Judeo religions, sexual orientations, Hitlerian "vermin" and national "blood-poisoning," political opponents, the Constitution, killed and wounded soldiers, the United States itself — a garbage can.
Did I mention his public boner for a dictatorship? And if still stuck for ideas, the super PAC could simply run choice segments of last weekend's Bund rally at Madison Square Garden. This isn't hard.
Some object that voters already know this, all of it, about Trump. But the some are mistaken. There are swarming legions of voters in possession of the very faintest knowledge about current events, past events, politics, the two parties, political players and most important, the ghastly, ghoulish personage of Republicans' presidential nominee.
The immensity of electoral ignorance is astonishing to the point of genuine unbelievability among informed Americans. In a way they're projecting; they're informed, hence most others are at least somewhat informed. Would that it were so.
Harris has of late picked up the Trump-bashing pace in her speechifying appearances, but such events reach small numbers. His inhuman abnormalities demand every manner of nationwide broadcasting.
There's a touch of irony here. Someone on the Harris-Walz staff — someone tuned into what voters should be hearing, or perhaps someone tuned into what a media consultant knows they should be hearing — produced and directed what could be called a near-perfect Trump-disembowelment advertisement.
Yet though the ad is perfect, its placement is far from it. It's running digitally only, when it should be on every network and streaming channel with whatever frequency the campaign's remaining tens of million of dollars can buy (it began Oct. with $187 million on hand) throughout seven days — which, I imagine, would be roughly every 1o minutes on every airtime known to the cosmos.
If only the super PAC Future Forward had produced and aired this ad.