Times change — quickly, I guess. Compared to just a year ago, or even a few months ago, the air in America is now “crackling with optimism.” Or so proclaims this article in today’s New York Times. And as a consequence, the Times story continues, the nation’s largest companies, trying to catch the wave of optimism, are ratcheting up the happy talk in their commercials.
That may or may not be so. I’ve seen nothing more than anecdotes — the ones in the Times story — that indicates that it’s true. (I handle the remote at Casa Sigelmana, and I don’t stick around for the commercials. So I have no data to report, or even first-hand impressions.) But let’s assume that the Times, which is of course correrct about everything else, is right about this, too. Seems like politicos would have caught on by now, too, doesn’t it?
I don’t have any hard data on the tone of this year’s batch of political campaign commercials to contribute, either — one reason being that this is an odd-numbered year, so there are few major political campaigns going on. But if one ongoing race — the Virginia gubernatorial contest between Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds — is any indication, going negative is hardly a thing of the past. Here are a couple of examples:
Let’s see what happens more generally in the 2010 round, assuming that what the Times takes to be the current mood of rosy optimism still holds by then. Anybody wanna bet that candidate ads will be any less negative next time around than they have been in recent years?
(For whatever it’s worth, my perception is that Deeds’ ads have been decidedly more attack-oriented than McDonnell’s — perhaps because McDonnell has been in the lead throughout the campaign, and perhaps because the Deeds campaign has concentrated so single-mindedly on hitting McDonnell over the head with his M.A. thesis.)