There are two campaign commercials from House hopefuls in 2018 worth considering as a pair. The first one is from Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Dan Helmer, a Democrat challenging at least seven others in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District to face Rep. Barbara Comstock.
Primary politics being a circus, attention for its own sake is often beneficial to candidates in a crowded field. Helmer attracted some with an advertisement he released Monday, in which he spoofs (if not desecrates) a famous scene from Top Gun by serenading an actress playing Comstock with “You’ve Lost That Centrist Feeling.” The lyrics are nothing if not efficient: Half the first verse is written with Yoda-like syntax, half contains the song’s clearest statement of the candidate’s policies, and somehow they’re the same half.
Helmer was roundly jeered for the ad. But he did earn a ton of free media from it. Free media translates into visits to his campaign website, where Democratic voters can learn he’s a Rhodes scholar and wannabe Maverick only in the theatrical sense (“Patriotism is progressive,” he writes). At a moment more political aspirants are running to the right and left of sanity itself, Helmer is merely a guy making a good-natured gag. To call it “the worst ad of the 2018 elections” is a bit of an overstatement.
One of the better ones, based on popularity alone, is the two-and-a-half-minute video announcement from ironworker Randy Bryce, who looks to challenge House speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s 1st. The commercial received more than 36,000 retweets off the promotion of a former Hillary Clinton staffer. It’s been viewed on YouTube nearly 600,000 times. “The video netted $100,000 in campaign donations in 24 hours and $430,000 in 12 days … and landed Bryce, whose cheeky nickname is ‘IronStache,’ appearances on cable news shows and write-ups in magazines,” wrote one such magazine.
But if honesty still counts for something, the commercial isn’t nearly as good as it’s been cracked up to be.
The spot begins by quoting Ryan, in his voice, on his party’s efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. “This is repealing and replacing Obamacare,” he says. A few moments pass. He speaks again: “Everybody doesn’t get what they want.” Another pause. Then the ad transitions to Bryce’s mother explaining the symptoms of her multiple sclerosis and the drugs she takes to manage them. Bryce says she “is probably the most important person in my life,” and “there’s no doubt in my mind that there are thousands of people like her that don’t have what she has.”
The implication is obvious: Ryan is saying that Republicans are repealing and replacing the health care law without regard for people like Randy Bryce’s mother. This has been the perception of Democrats and the sort of skeptical independents this ad is trying to reach. Now here’s the House speaker admitting it on camera. Devastating, supposedly.
Except the video is playing a dishonest shell game with Ryan’s words. Go to the transcript, and you’ll see that his remark was directed not toward people worried about losing their health insurance, or toward those who want to keep Obamacare—but toward his conservative GOP House colleagues, who were loath to compromise to pass a bill. The quoted lines come from the March 12 Face the Nation:
Bryce himself communicates a blue-collar, community- and family-focused message in the advertisement. There’s no reason to doubt his authenticity. But there’s no reason to doubt that of his ad-makers, either: Distortion is an authentically political best practice, and it’s one Bryce approved in running this commercial. It’s common for politicians and their aides to wrongly frame the words of their opponents to obtuse degrees. But editing a person’s words out of context to make it seem he said something he never did is different: It’s the difference between misinterpretation and misrepresentation. The latter is a cheap foul even for the lowly standards of politics.
This is a nifty example of how our culture tends to elevate style over substance. Dan Helmer is derided for being awkward even though he’s honest, while Randy Bryce is praised for being authentic while his political appeal originates with a viral mischaracterization. Bryce has a legitimate policy disagreement with Ryan on health reform; having it out on the merits would be a welcome shift from the political messaging that has come to define the issue. But candidates for office rarely have to argue on the merits when they’re rewarded most for being typically political.
