Character/Assassination
Seconds , produced
by Bob Squier of Squier, Knapp & Ochs for Clinton/Gore '96.
Seconds daringly
capitalizes on Jim and Sarah Brady's conversion to the Clinton camp, combining
the horrific footage of John Hinckley's assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan
with a stirring endorsement of Clinton from Brady, who was grievously wounded
in the assault.
Nancy Reagan has denounced
Seconds as falling below "even the minimum levels of current political
advertising." Apparently Mrs. Reagan hasn't seen many political spots lately.
President Clinton himself decided to reject her demand that this ad be yanked
off the air.
The spot is aimed at swing
voters--suburbanites, Republican women, and fiscal conservatives who disagree
with the dominant Republican position on issues like guns and
abortion--precisely the kind of people Jim and Sarah Brady were when he was
serving as President Reagan's press secretary in 1981. Seconds speaks
not only to the swing voters who are swinging so decisively to Clinton that he
leads in normally Republican suburbs and states; it captures and plays upon the
mood of an electorate that this year seems to despise the negative ads if they
involve personal attacks. (The Clinton campaign has run plenty of negatives,
but almost entirely focused on issues.)
The first scene is the
familiar news footage from 1981: A smiling and waving Ronald Reagan outside the
Washington Hilton takes a bullet to the chest. The message here is that even
the most optimistic person in America can be struck down by a gunman. The
presence of this defining Republican president in a Clinton ad signifies and
reinforces the appeal across partisan lines.
The visual shifts to the
wounded and bloodied Brady on the sidewalk and we recognize the voice, heard by
tens of millions during the Democratic National Convention. Jim Brady's slow
words hit like soft hammer blows--"It was over in a moment, but the pain lasts
forever." We next see Brady at home, recovered, lessened physically, but
seemingly indomitable. The scar across his forehead speaks to the injury he
suffered; and as he speaks, he passes the torch of his own courage to the
president who signed "The Brady Bill." We don't even have to be told what the
bill is anymore; we may not know all the details, but we know--and the pictures
tell us--that it's designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and
unstable loners.
In footage of the bill's
signing, the president hands the pen to Jim Brady, whose voiceover celebrates
Clinton's "integrity" and his determination to "do what was right." Issues like
gun control--not Whitewater or FBI files or some murky allegations about an
Indonesian connection--are the measure of character in Seconds . Without
a single negative word, this spot efficiently repels the Dole campaign's
ninth-inning attack on Clinton's character.
Brady
says, "When I hear people question the president's character, I say, look what
he's done ..."--cut to Clinton walking by himself, maybe even biting his lip--
"Look at the lives the Brady Bill will save." The language is simple and
authentic; the witness carries a credibility that the anonymous, disembodied
narrators of Dole's anti-Clinton jeremiads could never claim.
--Robert Shrum
Robert
Shrum is a leading Democratic political consultant. His deconstruction of
political ads is a weekly feature of Slate during the election
season.
