After surfing the Web’s political pages in an attempt to find a good, serious topic to write about, I stumbled across one of the more humorous and provocative political animated cartoons that I have ever seen. In the cartoon, from the Democratic National Committee, the narrator asks a man if he has ever thought about retirement. Then, President George W. Bush pitches his plan to the man. Bush’s accent, of course, is made fun of extensively by a voice eerily similar to Will Ferrell’s Bush impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” The cartoon Bush says that his plan for Social Security renovation relies extensively on the stock market. He is selling this plan to the man.
Bush tells the man to trust him and promptly pushes the man into a wheelchair. He rolls him down a stock market graph, where he falls end over end, screaming down the endless abyss of a bear market, while the narrator of the cartoon tells us the shortcomings of the Republican Social Security plan.
Bush then finds an elderly woman in a wheelchair and gives her a nice shove off the market graph cliff. She tumbles down the graph, shrieking in horror as she smashes into the bottom of the graph and splatters into a cloud of dust. Finally, Bush runs back and forth across the scene, pushing a wheelchair and asking if anyone wants to take a ride with him and his risky plan.
Although I believe that the cartoon was an attempt at a political brand of funny, edgy advertising, it has created quite a bit of controversy. In Friday’s Washington Post, the Republicans responded to the cartoon. Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va. ), chairman of the House GOP campaign committee, said, “Creating videos that depict the president rolling wheelchair-confined seniors off of cliffs is absolutely reprehensible, even for them.”
Democratic officials associated with the Web site have responded to the criticism of their ad, saying that the cartoon was simply a humorous take on a serious issue.
I think that these kind of edgy and issue-based ads are a step in the right direction. Obviously, pushing people off of a cliff is not necessarily an encouraging thing to see, but have we forgotten the incessant mudslinging of several recent elections?
We only have to think back to an Alabama congressional campaign earlier this summer when one candidate stated that he was the better choice for the office because the other candidate was infertile and could not have a child. The ignorant candidate said that he had a better idea of how to raise a family than someone who was physically incapable of having a child.
Personal attacks on character, physical attributes, family and other meaningless variables have become an ugly and underhanded part of the American political landscape.
Witty cartoons like this, even though they are somewhat offensive to some, are a far easier pill to swallow than ignorant name calling and mudslinging that accompanies most elections, because this ad discussed a relevant issue.
Check out the cartoon at www.democrats.org and click “Social Insecurity.”
Josh Johnson is a junior broadcast meteorology major.