The anti-Hillary ad similarly said things no one else would say. No other candidate was going to air an ad comparing Hillary to Big Brother, but the ad captured things about Hillary that many people feel, or it wouldn’t have had such resonance: that she is relentlessly calculating and anodyne, and that her front-runner campaign built on inevitability has a Nurse Ratched quality to it — you will vote for me, and you will enjoy it.
Other anonymously posted clips on YouTube in recent months have provided indispensable negative information about the candidates. There’s the pro-life convert Mitt Romney, for instance, slickly defending his pro-choice position on abortion a few years ago. Surely, the Romney camp would prefer that clip were long forgotten, while no rival campaign would ever want to own up to posting it. The very anonymity of the process makes it possible.
The 1984 ad has prompted a bout of worry from the media and political professionals. Campaigns, we are told, are running out of anyone’s control, as if this is a bad thing. Since when do we want our politics “controlled” by anyone? Anyone, anywhere, the worriers say, can post negative material about candidates. So what? Positive ads are often as misleading as negative ones. This is a point implicitly made by someone who posted on YouTube a Rudy Giuliani ad from his 1993 mayoral campaign that depicted him, in sickeningly gauzy terms, as an utterly devoted family man. How’s that for dishonest advertising?
Yes, there is plenty of vile and false material on the Internet. And things aren’t always what they seem — the anti-Hillary spot was created by a professional employed by a firm that was on contract with Obama. But the public can be trusted to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is its proper role in an open society. The hand-wringers look at the 1984 ad and see an awful trend, potentially dragging down our politics. Instead, they should see freedom. Get over it.
© 2007 by King Features Syndicate
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