Romney's Ugly "America the Beautiful" May Be the Soundtrack of the Next Three Months

Although many folks remember the Willie Horton ad from the 1988 Presidential campaign for what it presaged of the mass-mediated Movement Republican demagoguery to come, I remember best myself the lethal effectiveness of Pappy Bush's "I Remember You" ad (which I can't find on YouTube, else I'd post it, too) which unfairly assimilated Dukakis to an unfairly maligned Carter to frame a compelling narrative of choice in which the images and slogans and soundtrack complemented one another at multiple levels, rewriting history in a satisfyingly simplistic way, weirdly packing the punch of a negative ad while seeming to be a positive one, provoking fear, inspiring warmth, and even zinging with good humor. It was a bravura ad in a year of awful ones (needless to say, I voted for Dukakis anyway).

More brutally negative in a time when unquestionable advantages follow from an early an insistent negative definition of opponents, especially when they are having trouble positively defining themselves, this political ad from the Obama campaign, the latest in a long and possibly endless series of ads attacking Romney's ruthless record of outsourcing at Bain and secretive tax avoidance schemes, like 1988's "I Remember You" may be one for the history books, and for many of the same reasons.



The ad, called "Firms," indeed firms up a host of Obama campaign narratives -- many of them wisely pushed by the Obama campaign against the highly vocal advice of out of touch Beltway pols and pundits too cozy themselves with Big Finance -- emphasizing Romney's ties to finance capital and the ties of finance capital, in turn, to the economic crisis in which so many people who have to work for a living (unlike Romney) are suffering, thus wedding the Obama administration to economic populist themes redolent of Occupy while at once attacking Romney's supposed key strength, his "competence" as a "businessman," and culminating in the slogan, "Mitt Romney's Not the Solution, He's the Problem." It seems to me that, like "I Remember You," this ad condenses a number of complexities into a satisfyingly simple narrative that propels us into a choice that seems curiously positive for all the ad's apparent negativity (an inversion of the tonal doubling in "I Remember You," but yielding much the same punch). And, again, it is most of all the mining of a rich vein of subversive humor through the musical accompaniment to the texts and images flashing fleetly by that enables this bit of propulsive discursive magic.

For even though Romney's robotically relentless and creepily secretive corporate predation is ruthlessly highlighted yet again in this devastating ad, can anybody doubt that the devastation this time is almost entirely an effect of the soundtrack provided by Romney's soulless tuneless singing of "America the Beautiful" throughout?

Is it possible for Presidential gravitas to survive intact the inevitable recoil of embarrassment one feels upon hearing Romney's painful performance? Is it possible to discern the secular multiracial multicultural reality that constitutes today's "America the Beautiful" in the so sad stiff straight staid square superannuated white-bread ugliness of Romney's reactionary rendition?

And, oh yes, it probably doesn't hurt that some may be reminded in witnessing Romney's sorry sing-a-long that the President, too, has occasionally had a song to sing...