Look, advertising of this sort gets results.
Do you actually think that the Doublemint Twins would have been the symbol for Wrigley's gum for decades if these inane ads did not sell gum? How do you spell relief? You'll wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with P-------t. Brusha brusha brusha, new I----a Toothpaste, says Bucky Beaver. All these ads are designed to put a word or an emotion into your mind. So is rolling a pair of slight white blonde bimbos around a tall Black Obama into a joint and letting you decide if they belong together. Two women one man. Polygamy. Muslim. Miscegenation! Bad! Wrong!
People are not rational when they watch ads, and many people have the reasoning part of their minds turned off when watching TV, anyway. It is not without reason that TV has been called "chewing gum for the mind." People enjoy watching other people bicker and fight and eat worms and win huge amounts of money by answering very easy multiple choice questions.
An uncle of mine never missed Wheel of Fortune. He watched twice a day, all in reruns. Of course he knew all the answers. And he was not by any means an unsuccessful person. He made it through HS, and worked in the aircraft industry as an assembler, at Sears in various jobs, and made a killing selling lots in Tarzana California. He was a millionaire. He hated Jimmy Carter because Jimmy had canceled a naval base in the desert where he had planned to build rental apartments for sailors and their wives. You could not ask him why he thought the Navy needed a base in the Mojave Desert without upsetting him in the extreme, because he ended up renting those apartments to Mexicans who overtaxed the plumbing and caused him much grief and woe. He eventually sold the apts. for a small profit (next to nothing, he said). He felt Jimmy Carter had betrayed him by not sending several thousand sailors out to the Mojave Desert for him to rent apartments to.
He wanted to shoot sea lions, and didn't see why clear cutting national forests was a bad idea. And most of his friends were more daft than he was. A good, solid Reagan Republican.
This ad by McCain was designed by marketing experts, and I imagine that it is especially effective for the undecided non-thinking, inarticulate sort of individual that will decide this election. There are a lot of stupid people in this country, Selling stupid people crap that they don't need, like selling a $60,000 Hummer to some yokel to drive to the supermarket in because her feels safer, for example is not only possible, it is at the core of the economy.
McCain (and Obama as well) will be peddled this way, because it it what gets results. It is not my fault that many of my fellow Americans are stupid, unreasoning oafs. I have dedicated my life to teaching them. But oafs they are, and they will decide who runs this unfortunate country. I am merely the messenger, revealing the battle plan.
