Hillary Clinton released a new attack ad against prospective GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump today after receiving an endorsement from her progressive primary challenger Bernie Sanders earlier this week. The spot was presumably created by Droga5, the agency the neoliberal Democratic candidate’s campaign hired back in November. While Droga5 would not confirm to Adweek that it created the ad, David Droga tweeted about it–and come on, it was definitely them.*
The ad, entitled “Role Models,” focuses on how Trump–and the outlandishly sexist/racist/xenophobic/ablist/etc. shit that comes out of his mouth–makes him a bad role model for children. Well, duh.
The spot employs a similar tactic to its predecessor, an attack ad released in May that relied on members of Trump’s own party describing him as a “bully,” “con artist,” “phony,” “utterly amoral” and “The most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency.”
This time around, the spot uses Trump’s own words against him. Children bask in their TV’s warm glowing warming glow and take in some of Trump’s more outlandish statements, including attributing Megyn Kelly‘s questions to her menstral cycle, longing for the days when protesters were beaten and carried out on a stretcher, mocking a disabled reporter and, of course, making as many racist statements about Mexican immigrants as he could in less than a minute.
The spot ends with the message “Our children are watching. What example will we set for them?” before presenting a clip of Clinton talking about the need to make sure our children and grandchildren are proud of the choices we make.
The attack ad will run in key battleground states like Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, New Hampshire, Virginia, Florida, Nevada and North Carolina as part of a $10.5 million ad deal announced in June.
We’re not sure where all the politically minded children glued to the presidential race are — We imagine a concerned parent saying, “Honey, turn off the Republican debate, you know I don’t like you watching that garbage.” Such a strained conceit does hamper the ad’s impact.
This effort will almost certainly not convince any of Trump’s followers to second guess their preferred candidate, as they’re already familiar and seemingly okay with his most controversial statements, but that’s clearly not the point. Instead, it seems to target those voters who are less than enthusiastic about Clinton but have a very unfavorable view of Trump, particularly young parents. It’s all about highlighting the importance of voting to keep Trump out of office (a key component, if not the key component, of Clinton’s campaign lately) It’s all for the sake of their children, and their children’s children, and some future generations as well.
*Good luck trying to get ahold of Clinton’s PR team or that of any other presidential candidate. We get why they don’t answer phones: can you imagine how many crazy people leave voicemails on Hillary’s official media line??