Posted on 09/13/2004 5:52:01 PM PDT by Spackidagoosh
The one with Willie Horton is awful.
The narration is also bad--if the one with Sharpton had a deeper, more somber sounding voice that one might be a bit better.
In any event, these that are presented hopefully will never make it on the air.
I sent them an e-mail telling them these will hurt the President. Some of you guys e-mail them too. I forgot to mention that I saw them on FR. I don't know how we can criticize the ads without making them think we are dem operatives. I can see it now. "Yeah, right....you're a Republican, sure you are."
Oh, I know! Somebody send them a link to this thread.
Over the last few days, several leading news organizations have run stories about the creation of a new 527 'advocacy' group called MoveOnForAmerica.org. Not to be confused with the anti-Bush MoveOn.org, this new group headed by GOP consultant Stephen Marks hopes to pull a "Willie (sic) Horton"-style attack on John Kerry with two TV ads -- one linking Kerry to the parole of an escaped-on-furlough convicted cop shooter (somebody else made a deathbed confession) and one chronicling the most nefarious side of Kerry supporter Al Sharpton.
The story was run by the Associated Press, and versions of it were carried in the New York Daily News. USA Today, the Charlotte Observer, the Kansas City Star, and even India's Hindistan Times. Marks claims 522,636 Internet hits over Labor Day weekend.
He also made some interesting claims about his resume. The one that caught the eye of Campaign Extra! was that he'd been an "investigative reporter" for New York Newsday. We worked at Newsday during all of the New York edition's 10-year run, and were in the NY newsroom for five of them. The name of Stephen Marks didn't ring any bells. It also didn't get any valid hits on a Nexis search of the Newsday data base.
Marks claims "he has also been a press secretary in GOP campaigns (including Jeb Bush's bid for governor in 1994)." But if he was a press spokesman, he must have been a very soft-spoken one, because again there were no Nexis hits for Marks and the Jeb Bush campaign. So then Campaign Extra! tracked down the man who really was Jeb Bush's 1994 press secretary, Florida political consultant Cory Tilley. Here's some of what he told us in an email:
"I have to admit -- it has been 10 years so I guess I could have met Mr. Marks --- but I honestly have no memory of him at all -- and as far as I know he did not work on Governor Bush's 1994 campaign. I was his Press Secretary -- and since we had an unusually small staff -- the only spokesperson." Tilley went on to say it's possible that Marks could have been a county-level spokesman, saying "I am searching for some explanation."
So are we. We also noticed some things that Marks -- who attempted a similar TV-ad ploy against Al Gore in 2000 -- left off his resume. That includes his work in 1996 for Pat Buchanan and also a pre-war 2003 Web site called www.downwiththedixiechicks.com (Google cache) peddling a song entitled, "You Don't Speak for Dixie."
Campaign Extra! tried most of the day to get ahold of Stephen Marks. He didn't return several messages left on the machine at the MoveOnForAmerica.org office near D.C., and he hasn't yet responded to an email. If and when he does, we'll update the item. It's not certain whether his Horton-esque commericials will ever air. It's not even clear if he's raised any money, although his Web page promises that "starting Tuesday, September 7th by 5 p.m. EDT, we will be able to accept credit card contributions."
UPDATE: A Newsday source checked the in-house data base and came up with a 1986 op-ed piece -- a rant against Ed Koch -- in which he's identified as a "free-lance political journalist" living in Queens. Does one op-ed piece, which didn't involve any actual reporting, make a person an "investigative journalist" for New York Newsday? We'll let you decide.
Of course, Marks himself could clear some of this up, especially the Jeb Bush thing. He did return my original calls -- at 11:25 p.m. on Tuesday. Even Campaign Extra! doesn't work that hard. He left two numbers, the MoveOnForAmerica.org office near D.C. and one in Nashville. We left messages on both but 10 1/2 hours later we still haven't heard from him.
Posted on September 7, 2004 07:38 PM
Yeah, right, just like Zell Miller and the Swift Boat ads.
Good research; these ads aren't bad ideas, but they're too poorly done to be effective.
Thanks for the ping!
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