Hillary Clinton’s announcement video that kicked off her 2016 presidential campaign will go down as one of the great works of political advertising and strategy in modern history. Decades from now Poli-Sci majors will be writing papers about that piece and what it meant to the 2016 election.
The candidate doesn’t even appear in the ad for the first 90 seconds. The visuals are a snapshot of very likable people, your fellow Americans, going about their daily lives. The mix of people is diverse, middle class and represent broad archetypes that will resonate with the average viewer. The characters depicted are real, approachable and totally believable. These people are your friends and your neighbors and they slip Hillary Clinton, someone who is most definitely not middle class, into this river of average Americana. Yet, for all its technical perfection, that’s not the real brilliance of the piece.
The real brilliance of this piece is that it’s inviting Republicans to stick their head in a noose. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Republicans will respond with attack ads. By being so consistent, the GOP has made themselves predictable and this ad is calculated to capitalize on the contrast.
Instead of coming back with their own positive vision for America and actually arguing issues, Republicans will come back with attacks. That will be a strategic a blunder of monumental proportions and the announcement ad is engineered with that response in mind from the very first frame. The great thing about Republicans as an opposition is they can be counted on to shoot themselves in the foot and the extremist faction of the party, which can’t keep their mouth shut on a good day, will rise to the bait starting on Monday morning. Instead of talking about the issues, Republicans are going to spend all of next week talking about Hillary Clinton.
What the ad did is put Clinton in the midst of a crowd of Americans and makes her campaign about them. So when Republicans start attacking her, by extension, they’ll be attacking their fellow Americans.you know one thing about republicans the ones that hate and run congress they are sooooooo predictable, they haven't had a new idea about anything they've been railing against for going on 7 years now the Pres. proposes something and the GOP machine starts up and smoke comes out the exhaust polluting the air we breathe but it's never different always the same things. if the Pres. doesn't say something this week we hear about Benghazi, Hilary's emails, failing foreign policy or we just follow the money of the right wing dark side and it will lead to one of those topics.
given that propensity for repetition it was a good heads up by the Hilary campaign to exploit it. going to be very interesting how the try to spin this and they will because they have lost if they ever had the ability to create so plan B recreate with the same mold. you have to wonder why their base hasn't noticed that what they were bemoaning in 2008 is what they are still bemoaning in 2015? easy to overlook the progress by Pres. when all you hear is everything is his fault if you are still jobless it's him, so the republicans have bought a pig in a poke and no lipstick.
