Liberal Video Contest

Hey, WTF... they neglected to mention our unequivocal pro-sunshine, margarita (sorry, I don’t care much for lollipops) and rainbow stance!

Anyway, here’s the video I voted for over at the Liblogs viddy contest. Nice job, Annie! This was one of the very few entrants that wasn’t just another feeble, painfully tedious attack on Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. Not of course, I hasten to add, that plenty of criticism in that direction isn’t fully warranted (I’m sure most folks across the political spectrum can rattle off a well-worn list of their favourite grievances, both great and small, by heart), but in my opinion and with all due respect to the dedicated creators involved, the salvos presently on offer all missed the mark to one degree or another. Check them out for yourself and tell me if I’m out to lunch.

Of course, just as most people lie through their teeth to pollsters, telling them what they think they want to hear or parroting what they feel is the appropriately “correct” response, almost everyone decries “negative advertising” as being tawdry, degrading, and representative of a shameful coarsening our political discourse, and other such twaddle. Yeah, whatever (is there an emoticon for eye-rolling?). The fact of the matter however is that they’re effective; meaning that as with most things to do with politics we, the voters… the rubes, if you will, are absolute, two-faced hypocrites for the most part. If this wasn’t the case, then negative ads wouldn’t be such a perennial fixture in almost every political campaign you can think of. So for starters, let’s accept that this form of advertising is a perfectly legitimate part of the propaganda arsenal.

That said, there’s indelicate art of sorts to putting together an effective negative ad and some fairly straightforward rules that should be followed that I’ll attempt to explore in subsequent posts. With an election possibly looming at some time in the not-too-distant future, how best to take on the Harper Conservatives is kind of an intriguing and not altogether irrelevant line of inquiry. And who knows… maybe by mucking about with some ideas in this regard, together we could even come up with a really good line of attack that will save the cash-strapped Liberal Party some expensive consulting fees. In any case, there might be some fun to be had in the process.