3 ms·

Karl Rove practically invented the attack ad. This is not an attack ad, it's a satire of an attack ad. Taken literally, yes, it's pretty stupid--attack ads gen

• anamax 17y ago
  > Karl Rove practically invented the attack ad. No, he didn't. Attack ads predate both TV and radio and were run on both almost immediately after they became available.
  • philwelch 17y ago
    Rove learned most, if not all, of his tricks from Lee Atwater, who was the Karl Rove of the Reagan/Bush era.
    • anamax 17y ago
      Whoever did Johnson's ads was a real piece of work. However, as I wrote, none of this stuff is new. It predates TV and radio. Heck, it even predates moveable type.
    • blasdel 17y ago
      Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
    • gruseom 17y ago
      There's a superb documentary called Boogie Man about Atwater, who died horribly and spent his last years seeking out everyone he had wronged with his ads and asking for their forgiveness. He was an amazing, contradictory character, a larger-than-life sort who holds far more interest than the pusillanimous toady Rove. I watched that documentary late at night in a hotel room during the 2008 campaign; I was on a consulting trip and had to get up early the next morning, but I couldn't turn it off. It explains a great deal about how all that dirt became commonplace.
      • GmanFUNK 17y ago
        Yeah, it's an amazing hilarious movie and those guys did it totally independent and then sold it to TV. Buy a DVD on their website (i Did) because it has killer bonus features too and i'm into supporting the Little Guy. www.BoogieManFilm.com
• miked 17y ago
  Karl Rove practically invented the attack ad. Most people here are probably too young to remember it, but in the 1964 US presidential election Johnson attacked Goldwater as a warmonger who was going to get us all killed in a war. He ran an ad that showed the cutest little girl standing in a field of grass holding a flower anad picking petals. Birds chirping. Then you see a mushroom cloud in the distance and, a moment later, the little sweetie is anihilated on camera for your greater edification. (He won the election.) In a fine piece of irony, it was Johnson, of course, who would later, following Kennedy (and against Eisenhower's approach), dramatically ramp up American involvement in the Vietnam war and get 55,000 Americans killed.