(Cross posted at MyDD)

This weekend, I watched the film, The Ad and the ego which has caused me to stop and rethink my view about political advertisements. What is it that we remember from political advertisements that we carry with us? We are perhaps not the best sample to work with because we pay close attention to politics. However, if we sit back and try to recall general reactions to the political advertisements we’ve seen, perhaps we can get some new ideas about what really works?

Please, take a few moments to recount what you remember for general feelings from political advertisements you’ve seen. My thoughts about Connecticut advertisements are below the fold.

So, with that, let me talk about my TV watching and what I’m remembering from the ads I see. We don’t watch a lot of TV in our house, but when there is an important political event, we watch the evening news. Flipping between the channels, and see a lot of the political advertisements

For the Connecticut Governor’s race, I can’t really remember any of Jodi Rell’s advertisements. All I have is a vague image of her looking ‘grandmotherly’. The only advertisement from John DeStefano that I recall is of him standing behind a podium, ready to debate the issues. Next to him is an empty podium. The advertisement that my wife remembers is of Mayor DeStefano standing next to a mailbox; something about ‘big ideas’. After the debate on Monday, where Mayor DeStefano came out with the great line, “I pray that I'll never be in politics so long as to give an answer like that," the images are pretty clear. John DeStefano, a man ready to debate the issues versus Jodi Rell, a befuddled grandmother, best represented as an empty podium.

The Senate race is even harder for me to talk about from a cursory view, since both my wife and I are staffers. Nonetheless, if I were forced to come up with three words that summarize my recollections of the Lamont campaign ads, it would be ‘So do we’. My five-year-old daughter goes around the house yelling, ‘And so do we’. So does my three-year-old niece. For the Lieberman campaign, I remember an advertisement where blue-collar workers were touting Sen. Lieberman’s ‘connections’ as if they were a good thing that helped save a submarine base. So, the summary of the images from the Lamont-Lieberman race; a candidate that brings in lots of people, or a candidate relying on old connections.

When you get to the 2nd CD race, there is an NRCC ad tying Joe Courtney to higher taxes and a Courtney ad tying Simmons to Bush. We can’t remember much more than that. In the 4th CD, Farrell has some ad about how Shays has gone over to Iraq a bunch of times and always backed Bush, until it became politically inconvenient. The NRCC has an ad running asking what Farrell is trying to hide about her years as First Selectwoman of Westport Connecticut. There are two ironies of this ad. The first is that in 2004, Shays asked the NRCC not to run negative ads in the fourth CD. He’s relented this time and has been called on it. More significantly, the ad where the NRCC, headed up by Tom Reynolds, asked what Farrell is hiding, came out at about the same time as the Foley scandal breaking. Like H.R. Halderman, Shays is questioning if the Democrats were responsible for leaking information about the scandal.

In the 5th, Johnson is also trying to play the caring grandmother role. She attended a memorial service for someone that died in 9/11. She helped an elderly veteran get some medals, and she is playing the fear card hard talking about how Chris Murphy supports FISA and that might make it harder for Bush to track Pakistani based terrorists. Needless to say, the Pakistani community has objected to that, as has anyone who understands things like how FISA works. The NRCC has jumped in trying to play the tax card, similarly to how they did in the second. I must admit, I don’t have any images of Chris Murphy in my mind from either his ads or DCCC ads. From my Democratic viewpoint, Johnson isn’t just a nutty grandmother, she is a dangerously nutty grandmother.

So, that is what I’m remembering from advertisements here in Connecticut. I would love to hear what others are remembering. I hope to tie all of this together in thoughts from The Ad and The Ego with some reflections of what we ought to be calling for in Ad Watch

(To keep the discussion together, if you are adding comments, please ad them at MyDD).