One of the fun bits about being in New Hampshire is that all commercial breaks on television are now fascinating opportunities for political reporting. In other words, lots of ads. Mitt Romney: His campaign is running a fairly bizarre radio spot consisting of some guy you've never heard of explaining that his daughter went to New York, alone and...disappeared. The father didn't know what to do. The police were lost and unhelpful. There was only one man he could turn to. A longtime business partner who he'd seen do the impossible. Mitt Romney. Romney set up a command center, pulled employees off their jobs to search New York, and found the daughter, alive and safe. None of the ad, of course, makes any sense. Why did the daughter go missing? How would sending employees to a massive city to conduct ground searches help? Did they find her, or did she finally call her father back? No idea. But it makes Mitt look competent and decisive in a crisis, and acts, I think, as a subtle jab at Giuliani, who ran the dark, dangerous city in which a presumably shy white girl got swallowed. Barack Obama: His current ad is a mixture of his unity rhetoric and near Edwards-level populism. The center of it is Obama, on a podium, booming that "I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda are over," then transitioning into the togetherness portions of his speeches. It actually strikes me as a pretty effective linkage, as, in Obama's populism, "we" becomes not just economic liberals and the downtrodden, but everyone who's not a corporate lobbyist, Republicans and Independents concluded. You can watch it here. Rudy Giuliani: I'd forgotten what a brazen fear-monger he is. Giuliani's ad is all about Islamic terrorists who want to kill us, and in particular you, all the more so if you live in a primary state. But democracy in America means we can disagree with us, but if you take away our freedoms (something that terrorists haven't really attempted, but Giuliani often tried), we'll rip off your head and defecate on your corpse. The ad implies, through body language and tone, that it's in fact Giuliani who will personally do this, but he keeps on with the "we." The strategy, so far as one exists, seems to be to leap ahead by being the candidate who takes IslamoFascistTerroThunderdomeism the most seriously, and win simply by mentioning it the most times.
