‘Willie Horton’ ad maker comes back with baseless smear

June 11, 2008

In April, right-wing hatchetman Floyd Brown, best known for creating the infamous “Willie Horton ad” in the 1988 campaign, launched a bizarre smear ad against Barack Obama. The point of the ad wasn’t especially obvious — Brown’s spot argued that Obama resisted an effort to allow the Illinois to execute gang members, which somehow contributed to three murders in Chicago, which somehow means he won’t be aggressive towards al Qaeda. The whole thing was kind of odd.

So, Floyd Brown went back to the drawing board, and came up with a more transparently stupid/deceptive smear.

For those who can’t watch clips online, here’s the script: “Question: Was Barack Obama ever a Muslim. He says no, but the Associated Press found records that showed Obama was in school as a Muslim living in Indonesia and the Obama campaign can’t explain why. Maybe it doesn’t matter if Obama were a Muslim back then, but it does matter if he’s not telling the truth about it now.” The final image on the screen shows Obama alongside text that reads, “Can we trust him?” (The ad also features a now-infamous picture of Obama wearing Somali garb, originally distributed in February.)

Now, it’s worth noting that Brown’s outfit, a political action committee called the National Campaign Fund, had just $14,027 in the bank at the end of March. These clowns must have raised at least some money in order to create the new ad itself, but it seems unlikely Brown & Co. are going to be financially able to get this ad in front of millions of TV viewers nationwide.

Which helps, of course, explain its level of inanity. Brown is trying to be outrageous on purpose, which would in turn prompt a heated response, which would in turn generate interest in his smear campaign, which would in turn inspire unhinged lunatics to give him money so the ad might actually air.

So, is it better to just ignore the garbage and wait for Brown to crawl back under some rock? Perhaps, but there were those who said the same thing about the Swiftboat Liars in 2004. Ignoring trash doesn’t make it stink any less.

The Huffington Post, which accurately calls the ad “sleazy,” did some fact checking.

For starters, the school Obama attended at the time was Catholic — a spokesman for Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs said as much. And while someone did list Obama as a Muslim (the religion of his step father) on a document that required students to list religious affiliations, the campaign has insisted that it was a mistake.

“Senator Obama has never been a Muslim,” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s communications director, said. “As a six-year-old in Catholic school, he studied the catechism.”

Moreover, Brown’s own ad concludes that the issue is inconsequential. “Maybe it doesn’t matter if Obama were a Muslim back then,” the spot goes, before questioning why he won’t tell the truth now.

What may be more telling than the smear ad is the reaction that it engenders. Brown has a history of using barely discreet racist messaging to drive political discussion. So it is hardly a surprise to see him meddling in the Obama-is-a-Muslim affairs.

But Sen. John McCain has pledged to run a smear-free campaign. His candidacy has no direct connections to Brown’s National Campaign Fund. And yet, his reaction to the group’s latest work could go a long way in determining the tone and tenor of the general election.

Ben Smith added an interesting point: “If there’s an upside for Obama, it’s that what had been a faceless viral whispering campaign now gets the face of a Republican operative explicitly working to elect McCain.”

It’s getting ugly in June. And the Republican Attack Machine is just getting warmed up.

“When Barack Obama was six years old his mother took him to a FOREIGN country and sent him to a school full of FOREIGNERS. Why didn’t Obama run away from his evil mommy … eh what? She’s white?”

“When Barack Obama was six years old, he forced his dear sweet mother to take him to a FOREIGN country…”

Fine, can we talk about how McCain was born in Panama?

But Sen. John McCain has pledged to run a smear-free campaign. His candidacy has no direct connections to Brown’s National Campaign Fund.

Please, we’ve seen this movie so many times we can recite the lines in our sleep:

McCain will shrug and says he has no control over groups because this is America darn it. When asked if he disagrees with the ad he’ll point out that this is America, darn it, and people have the right to free speech. Then he’ll tell the reporters to get off his lawn.

  • MSNBC’s Chris Mathews will make sure the ad is seen by his viewers. So will the bearded one on CNN. Bet on it. These ad makers are smart. They know substance doesn’t play well in Peoria so they create horse shit that does. Nicole Smith is turning over in her grave….

  • Steve, his target is free media.

    Now that it’s out, Fox can show it over and over, either because “The Obama is a Muslim question won’t go away” or if there is a heated response among Dems, the Fox story is “Dems try to supress stirring new ad on Obama”. Either way, they win.

    The Republicans will have to make do with a lot less money this time around, so watch for them to maximize free media access

  • Since children don’t have the capacity to choose their religion, they’re actually just wearing the label that their parents put on them.

    In fact, most of us continue to wear the label our parents branded us with as children. How many of us, anywhere in the world, change religions after research and reflection? Since most Americans are Christians, most Indians are Hindus, most Pakistanis are Muslims, …I think it’s safe to say that nearly all of us are products of indoctrination.

    In short, who gives a rat’s ass which label Obama wore as a six-year old?

  • Besides laughing at it they should also just laugh it off. Always refer to it as what it is…so stupid it’s laughable.

    Republican smears work only on those who want to believe them.
    Bush was able to fool a lot of republicans…McCain can’t.
    btw…when McCain says “he” doesn’t want to run a negative campaign, he’s only speaking for himself. Just like the “bitch” comment, I doubt he will say anything about anyone else running such a campaign.

  • So, is it better to just ignore the garbage and wait Brown to crawl back under some rock?

    Absolutely NOT. Drag this squirrelly little runt out into the open and ask the world if they think he’s worth the money it took to produce his fairy tale—then pick him apart like a pack of wild feral dogs does to a rabbit by demolishing his lie on a point-by-point basis.

    And spend the money to do it, too. Outspend these clownish cretins to the point that they’re bankrupted—and then “invite” them to go back to the pits from whence they came.

    AND NOT UNTIL….

  • I can see Wolf Blitzer showing the ad at least eight times a day on Situation Room:

    “There is a new ad out there that says Barack Obama used to be, and I stress, used to be a Muslim. You’re going to want to see this. (ad airs) Now to be fair, the Obama campaign says he was never a practicing Muslim. But will this be important to Americans when they go into the voting booth? After the break we’ll show you a new poll where we asked whether religious upbringing matters to you. The results may surprise you. Stay tuned. I’m Wolf Blitzer and this is the most trusted name for news on television.

  • That’s a really really crappy ad. I’m sure the few people who see it will only like Obama more for having seen what was obviously a cheap smear. Even if you don’t know the truth, it’s doubtful that this one tiny piece of evidence will make people start thinking that Obama’s a Muslim or a liar. It’d be one thing if they had some sort of college-age Muslim link or something, but even if you believed the smear in the ad was true, it’s still pretty weak stuff. Most folks won’t want to be on the same side as this obvious smear.

    Do you think the guy that made this has “Creator of the Willie Horton Ad” on his business cards? I’d like to see that.

  • I’d say the way to go would be to connect the smear merchants to McCain. I’m sure there’s some tenuous connections, and it won’t matter how flimsy they are, we need to get it out there that McCain’s friends are smearing a guy who’s trying to bring civil discourse back into politics.

    It’s also a good time to remind people that they don’t call John McCain “McNasty” for nothing. The guy has publicly called his opponents’ s kids “ugly” and his own wife a “cunt”. That should be enough to tell you if McCain would stoop to whatever level you’re talking about.

  • Doctor Biobrain, I wish I could share your optimism, but the truth is, a lot of low-information voters out there– a huge swath of the population– still think he’s a Muslim, or at least have some notion that he might be. Running this ad will only reinforce that meme. I hope Obama’s team has something powerful with which to counter it– I wish I could personally talk to Axelrod and Plouffe, and tell them that the way to beat Republican smears is to use the key phrase “You’re Too Smart.” I’ve mentioned that here before, but for those who don’t remember, the idea is to simultaneously compliment the voters while subtly making them feel ashamed that they even considered the smears to be true. Obama needs to say something like this:

    “My opponent will try to distract you from the disastrous war, distract you from the mortgage crisis and an economy in peril, distract you from rising gas prices, distract you from the very real need for affordable health care, by coming up with outright lies about me, my family, and my faith. But I’m not worried. I already know, you’re too smart to fall for that! After all the times you’ve heard me speak about my Christian faith, you’re too smart to believe that I am, or ever have been, a Muslim. And you’re too smart to let a lie like this distract you while the opportunity for your children to go to college grows smaller. You’re too smart to stand by as CEO’s get tax breaks while your jobs get shipped overseas. You’re too smart to let a bunch of complete lies push the American dream out of your reach. You’re too smart!”

    That’s how to counter GOP slime.

  • Take this as an invitation to go on the offensive. The GOP is desperate. They have proven they cannot govern, their underlying “philosophy” is demonstrably morally and intellectually bankrupt. The only thing they have left is fear and smear. Every time an ad like this airs, Democrats ought to be howling for McSame to denounce it since he said he wouldn’t stoop to this (doesn’t matter whether he authorized it or not) make him denounce this crackpot shit and if he doesn’t call him a liar and if he can’t make it stop call him a weakling (if John McSame can’t control these groups how can he stand up to the tururists?)

  • CC @ 11, you’re absolutely right. If you go to different sites (news, blogs, etc.), you will see various memes sticking quite well. Truth matters little. Once it’s out there, all it takes is a few who lack ability to think critically (or honestly, or intellectually for that matter) and it’s all word of mouth.

    What fails me is that after months of Jeremiah Wright and “that church” of his, that the Muslim meme still holds any water.

    What’s even weirder is when people combine the two.

    When you have a populous which has been systematically dumbed down (purposefully, I will add), this is what happens.

    Uneducated rubes who buy anything. Dobbs and his icky brown people rants. Any icky brown person is bad. Obama is brown. Icky, icky, icky. Fear of anything different. Fear of other people’s religions. Lies and distortions of any flavor of the above.

    It is a very sad thing to see how people are willingly being played for fools.

  • BTW, my brother once put that he was an Eskimo on a school application because he was born in Alaska (he was young and somehow imagined that this was correct). I can just see the attack ads they’ll make against me based upon that. Especially after eight years of President McCain’s disgraceful presidency ends with a renewed attack on American Indians.

    Scary Voice: Doctor Biobrain claims to be a patriotic American, yet his brother once admitted that he was an Eskimo, one of the dreaded Indian tribes currently attacking our brave troops throughout much of the nuclear wasteland in Old Canada. Use your Patriot Implant Chips to contact Doctor Biobrain and ask him why he hates the United States of the Americas so much as to have an Evil Eskimo in his family. I’m Dick Cheney Clone III and I approve of this message.

  • What Stevio and Danp said. Tweedy will show this all week. Then next week he’ll ask why every is paying attention to this crap and show it again.

  • MsJoanne, regarding your incredulity over how people could still think Obama was Muslim after the whole bit about Jeremiah Wright and the church . . . remember, a lot of ignorant people out there think that every religion goes to worship in a “church.” I remember a time when I was talking to a particularly ignorant citizen who claimed that “the Jewish church tried to take the Pledge of Allegiance out of the schools.” And when I attempted to counter her false statement with factual evidence, stating that 1.) Jews don’t go to church, we go to synagogue, and 2.) unlike corporations and municipalities, religious groups cannot officially function as plaintiffs in U.S. court cases. And how did she respond? By simply saying, “Well, you’re WRONG!”

    So, if we want to win over the ignorant masses, we have to do it not with logic, but with psychology, which is what I described above with the “You’re Too Smart” catch-phrase. Al Gore and John Kerry relied on logic; they thought that if they laid out a carefully considered, factual argument, the American public would see that they were reasonable and thoughtful, and realize that their opponent was a complete idiot. Well, it didn’t work. People vote with their guts, not their heads, so that is the level at which we have to appeal to them.

  • File suit against Brown and the 527 for the intentional tort (read: eligible for punitive damages) of slander.

    It is true that because Obama is voluntarily a public figure and the speech has a political purpose that First Amendment protections are at their peak and the suit will surely lose, probably on a dispositive motion.

    Still, if in fact the 527 had only $14,000 in the bank, even the shortest-lived legal battle in an expensive venue (like Chicago or NY or DC) would burn every cent of it, win, lose or draw.

  • First, for reasons expressed by TheCC, and in my own and ej’s posts on the Michelle thread earlier — this is not a time to go on the offensive — except in the way CC mentions — and do you realize how many times Obama has said precisely that.

    No, we won’t roll out our own 527s, but there is nothing wrong with Obama supporters who are being interviewed pointing out the similarity to Willie Horton, or pointing out that Brown’s partner at ExposeObama was disbarred for a typical far-right tax fraud scheme (see Dave Niewert’s post at Firedoglake
    http://firedoglake.com/2008/04/29/exposeobama-exposed/
    for details.)

    But there’s another thing that Obama supporters — and this time I mean us — can do. (Now don’t be shocked at the idea. I know we act too often like baseball fans who think they are supporting their team by cheering — or yelling at the Umpires — from the couches in our tv rooms. But we can actually play a part.)

    We can write letters — not e-mail, old-fashioned, snail-mail delivered, typed or handwritten letters with a real stamp on them — to the news directors of MSNBC, CNN, and any local tv stations, in which we (calmly and respectfully — I can’t stress this enough) call their attention to the facts in Dave’s article, ask them if they had looked into this, and asking them if they think such an organization should be mentioned without challenging it on these points.

    We are so caught up in our fantasies about the media — and while we have more evidence behind them that do the conservatives’ ‘liberal media’ claims, in fact both claims are equally false — that we give up on them. But television companies do respond to letters — especially if they are individual expressions and not obviously organized form letter crusades, which is why it is so important you put them in your own words. If they get a couple of dozen letters referencing the Niewert piece, or reminding them of “Willie Horton” they will CTA by looking into it. And then they will find it very hard — and very risky, if this story is so much ‘out there’ — not to respond by challenging the organization.

    [And, btw, THIS was precisely the response I’d hoped my Perkins piece would cause. Yeah, I have a pretty big ego and it was nice to hear I’d done a good job, but that really didn’t matter. I didn’t write the piece for the applause it might get, I wrote it to get the veneer of ‘respectability’ stripped from that pompous hypocrite, and to get him kicked off the airwaves and to stop newspapers using him as their ‘go-to’ guy to get the sense of the Religious Right. And that’s how I hoped readers would respond — then later I would savor the hell out of the applause.]

  • “They’re at it again”
    “They’re smearing Obama again, this time calling him a Muslim”
    “It’s a lie”
    “It’s another lie from the ‘Party of Ideas’ — the Republicans”

    How about something like that as a counter ad? Attack them relentlessly for what they.

  • Everybody knows that Shit Floats.
    We also know that shit’s brown
    In this case it’s floyd brown.

  • Prup

    As much as I wish the nuts out there in La-La land were politically educated and saw all sides of issues and the candidates, there are millions of Americans who just don’t. They get all their political news from their right-wing churches, right-wing radio, and their right-wing neighbors. They believe McCain is a war hero and a saint, while Obama is a Black Muslim agent for terrorism.

    This kind of ignorance and racism MUST be tackled and firmly, I believe. Now, Obama can and will do that about the issues, but if he ignores the personal attacks, leaving the nuts with the impression that he isn’t defending himself against the attacks because they’re true, and if John McCain continues to be that war hero and a saint, nobody’s dealt with the problem. Simply said, somebody must deal with it. It’s a virulent part of American culture. Appealing to rationality with some people doesn’t make a dent in their beliefs.

    That said, perhaps we need to wait and see what Obama deals with and how he does it.

  • The right wing echo chamber will put the ad out there and amplify it through feedback and reverberation. So next the cable stations will pick it up. MSNBC and CNN will run stories about how sleazy the ad is and show the ad as illustration. FOX will run the ad and wonder how there can be so much smoke unless there is a fire under there somewhere. So it goes. This organization with less than 15K on hand will put out a multimillion dollar ad campaign without having to make a single buy. The Willie Horton ad originally ran only on cable stations (which back in 1988 was a very small audience), but got enormous play on broadcast channels via “the news”. I’m certain Brown is hoping lightning will strike twice.

    Ignore him at your peril and counterattack at your equal peril. I wish the MSM would get wise and make Brown the story and totally ignore his loathsome product.

  • #7 Danp

    Well your spot on impression of Beardy McGee quite literally made me spittake, you should be proud 🙂

    good work sir!

  • Why can’t some other PAC attack these a-holes and the Swiftboat Republicans?

    I can see why Obama doesn’t want to look like a weiny going after them, but some unaffiliated PAC could probably raise tons of money to go after them. Run dirty personal attacks about them and then link them to McCain.

  • CC at #11 is right on with the “you’re too smart” idea.

    Obama ABSOLUTELY must counter these things, must not ignore them, but he must not stoop down and go dirty.

    A calm, reasonable, “that’s bogus because of A, B, and C” (which the campaign then makes publically available) and then the “but the entire premise of this ad is absurd, the other side is trying to distract you and you’re too smart for that…” is what he needs to do. Be assertive in poo-poohing the side focus on fashion, wife, birth, whatever it is, for BOTH candidates.

    Personally I think Obama has been brilliant at this type of thing so far. People keep trolling him, he keeps refusing to bite. It’s great.

  • As someone who works in advertising, I look at the commercial – as I’d analyze any commercial – with regard to (a) who’s the target audience and (b) how effective and motivating its message to that audience is.

    With the Willie Horton ad, the message was as sharp as knife – Dukakis is soft on murderers and rapists. Whatever about the actual veracity of the central point, it struck deep into the hearts of people who had families and were worried about crime. Floyd Brown’s initial crude iteration of the proposition was finely honed by an ad agency into the ‘Revolving Door’ commercial. It ended up being a potent message, well delivered.

    This one? I’m not convinced. The target audience who would buy into a message this vague – he used to be a Muslim when he was 6 years old – is likely to be appreciated only by the people who are seeking to do down Obama anyway. Effectively, it’s advertising to trailer trash. The problem is they’re going to vote McCain anyway.

    It would prove counter-productive amongst independents and educated voters. Unlike the Horton ad, there is no resonance, no visceral feeling of an important matter being uncovered. It’s messy, vague and crude.

    People are not putting money behind Brown’s latest opus, because the smart money on the right says this is a dumb dead-end to go down. On that, I’d agree with them.

    • Comments are closed.