President Obama caused a stir recently by declaring that the Chamber of Commerce, which is running ads critical of his policies, is funded with foreign money.
It’s a weak criticism. And not just because the amount of foreign money involved is trivial. Or because labor unions and other political groups across the spectrum also accept small amounts of foreign money.
President Obama seems to be saying that people are smart enough to know whether or not a candidate or a political party is bamboozling them in their campaign ads. But people suddenly lose their wits when an outside group, or — gasp! — someone from another country does the exact same thing. That kind of cognitive dissonance must be difficult to live with.
Because arguments against foreign money in politics are so weak, people who use those arguments are either ill-informed or lying.
Lying is much more likely in this case. If your own arguments are weak, a common tactic is to distract your audience and hope they don’t notice. It works more often than not. Here, President Obama is taking advantage of the fact that almost all people suffer from anti-foreign bias. Not racism. Anti-foreign bias. They’re different. And pandering to that bias can be extremely useful politically.
Why does such a cheap tactic work? It’s because anti-foreign bias is in our DNA. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in small bands. Anybody outside that band was a very real threat to steal food, clothing, or potential mates. So people learned to be wary of outsiders. It was good for one’s life expectancy.
As tribes became villages, towns, cities, and now nations, the number of people we consider insiders has grown. And we treat outsiders much better than we used to. Trade is more common than war in most places. But most people are still instinctively leery of outsiders. It is our nature.
That’s why it’s disappointing to see President Obama so cynically play that card. Clearly he and the Chamber of Commerce prefer different policies. It would be nice to see the president engage the Chamber at a higher level than the ad hominem.
Apple's 1984 "Big Brother" ad
An article over at Ad Age brings up an angle on the whole auto industry bailout probably not considered much before. The fact that a yet-to-be-appointed “car czar” will have control over a multibillion dollar advertising budget for the big three. Under the guise of “oversight,” this would effectively “Create World’s Most Powerful Marketing Exec[utive].”
The draft rescue plan for Detroit sent to the White House by Congress yesterday calls for the appointment of a “car czar” who will oversee the Big Three automakers’ expenses over $25 million — which, by extension, would include media buys. Based on Advertising Age’s estimates of spending by General Motors Corp., Chrysler and Ford Motor Co., that would give the as-yet-unnamed car czar control over some $7.3 billion in marketing spending in the U.S. alone.
The most disturbing thoughts about this (particularly to those concerned with liberty) are provoked here:
The car czar would wield a budget more than double those of AT&T, Verizon, Unilever and Johnson & Johnson, which round out the nation’s top five marketing spenders, and give the car czar more clout with media and agencies than such famed names in marketing as Walmart Chief Marketing Officer Stephen Quinn and Anheuser-Busch VP-Marketing Dave Peacock.
…If the bailout goes through, agencies that work for the Big Three will essentially be toiling on a government account, with all the associated red tape and strictures that involves.
So there you have it. We should all be concerned about this for many reasons. As mentioned, the large ad budget that comes with a czar-controlled U.S. auto industry will allow a government bureaucrat to wield unbalanced and unchecked influence over not only who gets ad contracts, but what media outlets get ad money. The czar can simply refuse to give business to an advertising agency who works for a foreign competitor of the big three (or a “non-compliant” corporation), or refuse to pay money to show ads on outlets that they deem “unfriendly” to the administration or its mission. This will be an unequivocal disaster. We have already seen the lengths to which administrations (and pre-administrations) have gone to influence and/or silence media they do not like. What kind of power plays do you think are possible when the administration’s appointee controls a major source of media outlets’ ad revenue? Whatever it ends up being, it won’t be pretty.
The Yahoo-Google ad deal looks like it’s dead. The deal announced in June, would have allowed Google ads to appear on Yahoo search results. Yahoo estimated an $800 million profit during the frist year of the Google ad partnership and would have allowed Yahoo to continue its transion from search to content provider, making it a much more competitive company.
What has likely killed the deal? As stated in a Reuters article:
The two Internet companies have so far failed to reach an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice on implementing their search advertising partnership.
Why doesn’t the DoJ approve the non-exclusive agreement? Becuase of concerns over competition, that this will reduce competition in the internet marketplace. Anyone following Yahoo, however, knows that Yahoo is becoming less and less competitive as a search provider, but it’s attempts to become more competitive and focus on providing content, something it is much better at than google, are being stymied by government regulation.
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