Dannel Malloy has lied to us, over and over. Dannel Malloy always tells us the truth. Tom Foley has our backs. Tom Foley will ship our jobs to Mexico.
None of these statements are facts. They’re just a few impressions you may have from watching the campaign ads for Connecticut’s 2014 governor’s race.
As anyone who’s been paying even a little attention to politics around here knows, the contest between Dannel Malloy and Tom Foley has been a slugfest. According to the Wesleyan Media Project, it has the highest percentage of negative campaign ads of any governor’s race in the country. The candidates’ organizations and outside groups together have spent $28 million so far to get their men elected and they’ll spend more. Meanwhile, the race is neck and neck. So are the ads working?
As a public service, I sat down and endured a smorgasbord of political ads from both sides to find out — from the point of view of a TV watcher, not a pundit.
Both Foley and Malloy have taken to heart the idea that facts don’t matter. They’re going for the gut. Most of the time, they’re just trying to make it hurt. Every once in a while, at least to this viewer, they succeed.
Foley
Foley’s ad campaign started off pretty shaky. An early ad is aimed at wealthy people in New York City unhappy with new mayor Bill de Blasio, trying to convince them that they should move to Connecticut, especially if Foley gets elected. A couple hope to introduce Foley to Connecticut as a nice guy. Then there’s a series of charming, almost homemade-looking clips in which Tom Foley runs around the 95 corridor with a microphone and camera crew chatting with people and asking them leading questions about how they think Connecticut is doing. He’s on the corner of the New Haven Green. He’s at a rest stop in Darien. He’s near a bridge in Norwalk.
It’s debatable how effective these clips are as political ads. My favorite moment comes at the end of the rest-stop montage, when a man in a car says Foley has his vote. “I just need to know your name,” he says, “so I know who I’m voting for,” pointing out just how badly Foley needs a better ad campaign.
I’m not sure even this overwhelming positive ad about Tom Foley was a good idea.
Everyone in it seems really nice. But watching this ad, all I could think was: Is that Foley’s house? Is that his backyard? Man, that guy is loaded.
A little while ago, though, it looks like Foley hired an ad company, because the quality goes way up — and Foley goes after Malloy with a vengeance. There’s Malloy the liar. Malloy the failure, with no plan for the future. Malloy, the mayor who uses eminent domain to destroy small businesses. Meanwhile, super PAC ads focus on how much people are hurting, how betrayed they feel.
The information in the ads is all old, but it’s packaged in a new, doom-laden way. Aesthetically, the effect is bludgeoning. Watch all those ads in a row and there’s a good chance you’ll feel pretty miserable. It all comes to a head in this PAC ad:
In Foley’s ads, Connecticut is almost a dystopia. The government is lying to you, over and over, through grainy television screens. Businesses are failing all over the place. And — the ads are not subtle about this—half the people you know want to leave.
They’re hyperbolic. But they resonate, too, even if you didn’t see the poll finding that half of us apparently really do want to leave. Things are hard here. For a lot of people in the state right now, it’s hard to find work, hard to hold on to what you have.
It’s a big problem, even if you don’t blame the Malloy administration for it. The ads want you to by association, but never quite make the case. They also open the question, though, as to what Foley is going to do about it all.
And here’s where the ad campaign really comes up short. Because the answers are either vague, or when they’re more specific, they don’t seem like enough.
Foley says he’s going to lower taxes: “the sales tax. the car tax, and taxes that hold back job creators.” He’s going to “get control over spending by holding it flat for two years.” That’s it? I thought. Half of us want to leave and you come to us with the sales tax and the car tax?
There’s no big solution, something that feels up the task of taking on the big problem that the negative ads are so good at showing us. Foley’s negative ads start a building fire. His positive ads show up with a squirt gun.
Malloy
If Foley’s first ads are almost quaint and his later ads are a bit like sledgehammers, Malloy’s ads are savvier.
Malloy’s early ads anticipate where Foley’s campaign would eventually go. To the campaign’s credit, the ads don’t shy away from Connecticut’s problems. They also don’t overstate them, avoiding the problem Foley’s ad campaign sets up of needing to find a big, new solution to it. Instead, it portrays Malloy as a kind of survivor, like a boxer. He’s taken some hits and he’s still standing.
It’s a picture of Malloy that, to me, works. Though the ad also engages in an unfortunate sleight of hand by lumping together Connecticut’s dreary economy, its assault by hurricanes, and the shootings in Sandy Hook. It’s a little weird. Because when the ad goes on to talk about some of the progress Malloy’s administration has made on the economic front, it’s implicitly asking us to take the emotion we might feel from the hurricanes and Sandy Hook and apply it to Malloy’s fiscal accomplishments. It feels just a little manipulative.
As Mark Pazniokas reported in CT Mirror, a later ad builds on the previous one, featuring Milford mayor Ben Blake, whose town suffered the brunt of both hurricanes, and Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan was killed in the Sandy Hook shootings, praising Malloy for his leadership during crises and his passing of gun control legislation. This ad was criticized for being exploitative. Hockley herself disagreed. “I’m saying thank you,” she said, and I’m not contradicting her.
But in hindsight, it might have opened a door.
Malloy’s campaign ads and PAC ads alike focus on Foley’s Romney-like qualities of making money when plants close and people lose jobs. There’s also Foley the friend of the radical right, Foley the horrible boss. Like the ads in the Foley campaign, it’s mostly old news packaged to seem new.
But the attacks that focus on Sandy Hook — are left to the PACs. There’s this one. And this one, which pushes things a little further. And this one.
The last one is from Americans for Responsible Solutions, an organization spearheaded by Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly, who, along with Nicole Hockley, have far greater authority than any of us to talk about what is and isn’t exploitative in a political campaign and to translate the terrible things that happened to them into constructive political action. But taken all together — five different ads from four different organizations — is a line being ever so carefully crossed?
More to the point, does it need to be?
Because the one piece of information that sticks in my brain, after having watched an endless chain of political ads from both campaigns, is what’s imparted at the beginning of this ad:
The ad plays fast and loose with Foley’s quote that “this is America” in defense of his not paying income tax. Foley’s full quote from the Connecticut Post is that “there’s no creative accounting. If you don’t have taxable income, guess what, you don’t pay income tax. This is America.” This sounds slightly less haughty than just the last sentence on its own. But the damage is done, because those three words—this is America—are a hook. They help me remember that the fabulously wealthy Tom Foley paid no income taxes for the past couple years.
Which makes me think that it really is his enormous house, his expansive lawn, far from the realities that most people face in Connecticut right now, in that Foley ad that just wants you to think he’s a nice guy.
Maybe facts don’t matter. But certain facts can.