Posted by
Steve on Thursday, August 04, 2011 8:57:19 AM
Say what you want about Mitt Romney, the candidate. Mitt Romney knows how to pick a great PR team. The ads by the Romney team have been spot on a devastating to Barack Obama for months. Whether Mitt Romney wins the nomination or not, one thing is clear and that is that this PR team needs to stay on as the PR team representing the Republican nominee. They are that good. Usually Republican PR teams are wishy-washy and try to do too much. Romney’s team lets the story tell itself and also lets Obama defeat himself. The effect is lightning in a bottle.
The biggest problem Republicans have is getting their message out to the public. The dominant media culture leans far to the left and thinks that conservatives are “evil”. That makes it difficult for them to be objective in covering the Republican nominee. They are continually bumping up against this evil thing that the Republican is identified with. In order to get through that “white noise” you have to have a great PR team that knows how to identify a message and get it before the public.
Republicans do have talk radio and the internet to get the message out, but that requires that the people be listening for them to hear. Almost everyone watches TV at some time or other so it is important to have a message that resonates on TV as well. Romney’s team has captured this idea and has played it up over the months.
The theme of most the messages is that Barack Obama is unfit to be President. The rest of the messages tout the qualifications of Mitt Romney to be President. I must admit that the ones attacking Barack Obama are much better than the ones that build up Mitt Romney. But, Obama has given them so much material to work with that the task seems easy.
The problem with tasks that seem easy is that they usually are not easy. When someone else tries to do the same thing, they fall flat on their face. Even though Obama has given the Romney team plenty of material to work with, and they tend to use just Obama and his words in those ads attacking Obama, it still took some genius to put it together. In the latest ad on Chicago, they use visuals from Chicago and Obama’s words to paint a picture of an incompetent. The words without the pictures would not have the impact of both together.
I must admit that the Romney ads are about the only ones I have seen to date. But each one seems to get better than the one before. If you follow the ad campaign, you have to be saying that this is the way to attack Obama every time you see one of the ads. That is the beauty of using Obama’s words against him. It is difficult to say that the ad is racist when they just use the words of Obama to hang him. So far, I have not heard Obama react to any of the Romney ads, but I know that Obama goes out of his way to try and damage Romney as a candidate. I have to believe that these ads are hitting home with the Obama team or they would not spend so much time on any Republican candidate. Obama must feel that he can’t spend too much time on any particular Republican candidate or that might give that person a boost in the polls.