Too bad CNN just rejected the ad.

The immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice last week harshly criticized CNN for not mentioning that Dobbs is “one of the biggest menaces facing Latinos in America” because of his relentless focus on illegal immigration, largely from Latin America, as the source of many of America’s ills.

In response, it created this TV ad, with Media Matters, under the headline “CNN: Drop the Hate, Drop Dobbs,” that ends with a plea to viewers to sign the “Drop Dobbs” petition that’s been circulating online and on Twitter and Facebook.

Yesterday, the groups submitted the ad to CNN, asking the network to run it during the “Latinos in America” shows.

Not surprisingly, CNN today rejected the ad. The groups still hope to run the ad during the “Latinos” show on another network, if it can find a willing host.

The list of targets is a little bit surprising. Eight of them represent states carried by President Obama in 2008. Only two of them, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), are currently fending off potential re-election challengers in 2010.

And the ads are not, err, the slickest pieces of filmmaking in history. (Video after the jump.)

Flickr: Mrs. Carnahan

The Obama campaign announced Friday morning that it is investing new resources for a TV blitz deep in Republican territory, running new ads in North Dakota, Georgia  and Sen. John McCain’s home state of Arizona.

The announcement is either a small-buy head fake, which could stoke heady press coverage of the campaign’s offense in the closing days, or a genuine push to capitalize on McCain’s weakening standing in states that Obama strategists never thought would be winnable.

The new focus on Arizona is not one-sided, either.  McCain began spending resources there this week.  TWI’s Matt DeLong reported on its new robocall effort, explaining:

[W]ith McCain struggling to keep pace, the campaign can hardly afford to redirect money from battleground states to … Arizona. But McCain’s strategists must be at least somewhat concerned about McCain’s home-state standing, or they wouldn’t risk signaling weakness by taking this action. The robocalls will allow McCain to spread his message cheaply in Arizona.

McCain can try to shore up support with calls on the cheap, but Obama has enough money to make it rain in any red state he wants.  It’s striking that after marching around the whole country in a two-year national campaign, a presidential candidate’s fate can still turn on the local politics of his home state. But in close races, it can make all the difference. Just ask Al Gore, who lost his home state in 2000.

www.willyoujoinus.com

While walking around Washington, it’s hard to miss all the large Chevron ads. They are at bus stops and in metro stations, and they feature “everyday people” promising to conserve energy. “I will carpool to work,” one person in the ad says. “I will take the golf clubs out of the trunk,” promises another. “I will leave the car at home more,” pledges a third.

And, in each one, Chevron vows it will conserve energy, too.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Chevron launched its “I will” campaign last month in Washington, Houston and cities throughout California. The new ads continue the oil company’s “Power of Human Energy” ad campaign that began about a year ago. Through TV spots, print ads, billboards and a website called Will You Join Us, Chevron says it seeks to raise awareness about energy conservation and efficiency.

But exactly how green can an oil company claim to be? And will consumers buy its claims?

Chevron, America’s second largest oil company, with profits of $18.7 billion last year, isn’t the only oil producer spending millions to burnish its image. Like other big oil companies, it has switched gears from ignoring or denying climate change to announcing it role in combating this problem, oil experts say.

For example, if you’ve turned on the TV lately, you’ve probably seen a commercial like this from ExxonMobil:

Exxon, the country’s biggest oil company, with profits last year of $39.5 billion, recently launched its environmental-themed ad campaign. BP was perhaps ahead of this curve — for British Petroleum started rebranding itself as “Beyond Petroleum” in 2000.

Some experts say Chevron and all the other oil companies will have to work a lot harder to gain the trust of consumers, who are finally getting some relief at the pumps after gasoline prices hit $4 a gallon this summer. They say the companies will have to transform their actions, not just their images.

Chevron says it differs from the other oil companies because it invests in clean technologies and fuel efficiency. Those who study the oil industry assert that the company’s investment is minor when compared to its large profits.

www.willyoujoinus.com

But Kimberly Beman the Chevron spokeswoman said, “Between 2007 and 2009, Chevron has projected spending of more than $2.5 billion for alternatives, renewables and energy-efficiency services.” *

Beman also pointed out that, since 2000, Chevron Energy Solutions, a Chevron subsidiary that focuses on environmental issues, has developed hundreds of projects in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

“CES projects will help to reduce over a billion dollars in energy costs for customers,” Beman told The Washington Independent.

But a billion dollars spent over an unspecified period of time doesn’t exactly seem like a lot of money for a company that made a record $18.7 billion in profits last year alone.

Steve Kretzmann, director of the nonpartisan organization Oil Change International, said that Chevron’s priority is cleaning up its image — and that speaks volumes about its credibility on conservation. “Chevron spends millions and millions on these ad campaigns,” said Kretzmann, “and then doesn’t devote hardly any amount of money to invest in renewable-energy technologies that could make a huge difference.”

Chevron spent $15 million last year on advertising to promote it’s green policies, according to Grist. This seems to be the norm among the big oil companies.

Exxon, for example, spent only 1 percent of its record-breaking annual profit last year on alternative energy, reports ABC News.

www.willyoujoinus.com

But Chevron spokeswoman Beman says her company isn’t like the other oil companies. “We feel we differentiate ourselves from our competitors to say conservation is key to our [mission],” she said. “I think it’s just an overall call to action that all of us are responsible. Chevron is taking the lead in opening this discussion.”Kalle Lasn, editor-in-chief of Adbusters Magazine, a non-profit that studies consumerism, finds this claim surprising. Until recently, he says, oil companies like Chevron have been “instrumental in delaying the debate we needed to have on climate change.”

“For years,” Lasn said, “[they were] trying to deny climate change and keep the business-as-usual scenario going.” James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, agrees with Lasn. In June, he testified before Congress:

Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil fuel companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, just as tobacco companies discredited the link between smoking and cancer.

“Then, just a few short years ago” Lasn said, “when it became quite obvious that they couldn’t deny climate change any longer, one by one they jumped on this [PR] bandwagon…and started painting themselves as the good guys.”

That’s why almost all big oil companies now have ads greenwashing themselves, Lasn said. It started with BP — originally British Petroleum — changing its logo in 2000 to a sun and referring to itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” BP talks about this global branding strategy on its website.

Now, even ExxonMobil — a company known to have given millions of dollars to groups denying global warming — has launched green ads.Are these costly PR campaigns working?

Lasn says they have potential. “A lot of people are totally hoodwinked by this,” he said. “There are millions of people out there who actually do fall for it, who are not aware of some of the history of these big oil companies.”

That’s what Chevron is counting on, Lasn says.

Green advertising can help companies shape their brand, says Lasn, because even large corporations care about public perception.

“[Oil companies] know the next time there is a financial crunch, like now, or if climate change veers out of control even more than it already has, then their survival depends on how the public perceives them,” he said.

TerraChoice, an environmental marketing firm that conducts advertising research, agrees that green advertising can be effective. Media consultant Kate Rusnak says consumers are happy to see so many businesses moving in a more sustainable direction. As a result, she said, “there has certainly been a huge rise in the amount of green advertising.” This could be why even oil companies are jumping on the bandwagon.

Still, not everyone says Chevron is winning on the public-perception front. “I don’t think that [this ad campaign] is particularly effective for consumers,” said Kretzmann of Oil Change International. “The industry knows it has an image problem.”

*Note: This article originally did not say how much Chevron spends on its alternative energy projects. A quote from the oil company detailing its projected budgets was added to the piece after posting.

ABC spokeswoman Julie Hoover told the Guardian that the ad was too “controversial” to run during network-sponsored programs.

The commercial calls for ending America’s dependence on foreign oil by turning to wind power and solar power.

It also says that “big oil spends hundreds of millions to block clean energy” through lobbying and advertising. Apparently that was the part ABC deemed controversial.

The ad, titled “Repower America,” was supposed to run the night of the first presidential debate.

In a statement released last week, the CEO of Gore’s group, Cathy Zoi, said, “Did you notice the ads after last night’s presidential debate? ABC had Chevron. CBS had Exxon. CNN had the coal lobby. But you know what happened last week? ABC refused to run our Repower America ad — the ad that takes on this same oil and coal lobby.”

During the presidential debates, both candidates have said they support alternative energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Even President George W. Bush has talked about that. Yet, somehow, it’s controversial when an environmental advocacy group says it?

Watch the commercial for yourself:

Overall, Sen. Barack Obama outspent Sen. John McCain and the Republican National Committee,  $17.5 million to a combined $11 million. The Democratic nominee more than tripled McCain’s spending in the key swing states of Florida and Virginia.

A few comments on noteworthy data points:

*McCain’s third-highest state spending total ($1.25 million) was in Michigan, from which he pulled out last week. For a campaign that’s been strapped for cash, it’s clear in retrospect that the McCain folks blew a colossal amount of money in Michigan.

*The study notes that McCain devoted a higher proportion of his spending (60.2 percent to 46.5 percent for Obama) to the “Midwest battleground states” of Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Yet most of these states can’t really be considered battlegrounds at this point. According to fivethirtyeight.com, the latest polls show Obama leading McCain by 16 points in Iowa, 18 in Minnesota, 15 in Pennsylvania and 8 in Wisconsin. That leaves just Indiana and Ohio as true battlegrounds.

*Obama’s spending indicates that he’s not simply trying to win the presidency but also to redraw the electoral map and possibly to carry statewide candidates on his coattails. The largest proportional spending differential between the candidates came in North Carolina, where Obama spent $1,236,000, to McCain’s $148,000. Now, it’s extremely unlikely that Obama will win North Carolina without also winning Virginia (the two states have voted the same way all but once in the past 150 years, and North Carolina has consistently polled better for McCain), and it’s unlikely that he’ll win Virginia and lose the election. It is therefore almost inconceivable that North Carolina will tip the election — and McCain seems to realize this. But a victory in North Carolina would turn the state blue for the first time since 1976 — with potentially powerful implications for the future — and could help lift Democratic Senate candidate Kay Hagan, who’s in a very tight race with incumbent Elizabeth Dole.

Overall, the spending numbers show two important things. First, Obama is obviously spending more money in more places. Second, and perhaps more tellingly, Obama’s spending pattern reveals an underlying optimism, in contrast to McCain’s defensive pragmatism.

On another note, over the course of the entire campaign, 73 percent of McCain’s ads have been “negative,” compared to 61 percent of Obama’s. Yet last week, “nearly 100 percent” of McCain’s ads were negative, to just 34 percent for Obama.

More evidence that the Obama campaign is feeling confident, while the McCain camp is getting anxious.

Stills from Lyndon B. Johnson Museum and Library

In the annals of campaign advertising, it stands as a legend: A young girl plucking flower petals, counting each as it falls, is interrupted by a sinister voice counting down 10 … nine … eight … until a nuclear blast fills the screen, a fire-ball replacing the black terror in her eyes.

In the background, we hear the stern voice of President Lyndon B. Johnson: “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark, we must either love each other, or we must die.”

The year was 1964, and the ad, which aired only once, shifted the tone of Johnson’s successful bid against the sharply anti-communist Sen. Barry M. Goldwater. More than that, however, it ushered in a new age of political propaganda, highlighting the emotional power of advertising — particularly television advertising — to sway voters and decide races.

Political candidates have never looked back.

Indeed, it’s a sad truth of modern politics that campaign cash (ie, media funding) is prerequisite to any successful bid for higher public office — increasingly so. This year’s presidential contest will be the most expensive in history. The two leading presidential contenders have already spent roughly a quarter-billion dollars on advertising. If there’s one universal rule in politics, it’s that those who have trouble fund-raising need not apply.

“American politics,” said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, “has long ago shifted from an enterprise based on mass organization, to an enterprise based on TV and radio propaganda. It’s no longer labor intensive. Now it’s capital intensive.”

The reason is clear: ads work. And yet — considering all the hours of media attention, the public interviews, the endless campaigning, the viral Internet videos, the stump-speeches, the national conventions, the soon-to-be televised debates and the countless water-cooler arguments weighing the virtues and vices of the presidential candidates this very minute — the question remains: what causes voters to respond to short, one-sided bursts of un-nuanced messaging?

Why, that is, do ads work?

Clearly, the question cuts across disciplines, dredging to discover the countless reasons that folks behave the way they do, asking no less than what it is to be human. Faced with the question, Frank Ginsberg, chairman and CEO of Avrett Free Ginsberg, a New York-based advertising agency, said with a sigh, “We don’t have enough time.”

Yet there is a craft — dare we say a science — tested over decades, that allows advertisers to target specific audiences, appeal to their tastes and sensibilities, and predict with some degree of accuracy how they will respond. This is true whether it be a consumer buying a soft drink or a voter choosing a candidate.

A leading factor in this equation rests on emotional appeal. Ads are not just narrations; they attack the senses. In the case of Johnson’s “Daisy Girl” commercial (which never even mentioned Goldwater’s name) the intended response was clearly fear — a tactic repeated in the 1988 Willie Horton ad that helped sink Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’s White House hopes. Television is particularly suited to stimulate such an emotional reaction, combining images with music, text and narration to create an all-encompassing sensory experience.

“Ads are designed to have an emotional appeal that’s often more important than the actual information,” said Paul Freedman, a University of Virginia political scientist specializing in campaign advertising. “If you’re selling a car, you’re selling an image, you’re selling a state of mind. It’s not just a hunk of metal and plastic.”

In this way, Freedman added, candidates can brand themselves in the vaguest terms — an agent of change, for example, or a man of experience. The point being, Freedman said, that brands are “divorced from nuance.”

Campaign ads can also be effective by instilling confidence in voters seeking a reason to support a particular candidate. Marvin Overby, political science professor at the University of Missouri—Columbia, said many political ads fall in this category, aiming not to steal supporters from another candidate, but simply to mobilize those inclined to be their own. “Voters don’t want to feel like they have to flip a coin,” Overby said.

Darrell M. West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, echoed that message, saying ads frame issues in ways encouraging voters to feel a certain way about the candidates. “Political spots can’t create impressions that don’t already exist among the electorate,” West wrote in an email, “but they can encourage voters to see the candidates in particular ways. You can win by making people like you or dislike your opponent.”

In a prominent example this year, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican presidential nominee, attacked his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), for his celebrity, equating his superstar status to that of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

Repetition — the hammering away at an audience with a singular message — is also a powerful method of persuasion best accomplished through ads. In the modern political culture, these messages arrive “not just forcefully, but inescapably,” said Miller of NYU, who’s working on a book about the Marlboro Man, the ultimate in commercial icons. “Ideally,” he added, “you would have the commercial itself become a news story.” As was proven by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, even negative coverage is free advertising.

Finally, political advertisers are successful for the simple reason that many voters, for countless reasons, don’t follow politics very closely. Lynda Lee Kaid, professor of telecommunications at the University of Florida, said television ads allow candidates to lend an education (of sorts) that’s convenient to the viewer, providing “substantial amounts of information without great effort by the voter.”

Freedman, of UVA, agreed. “For many, many, many Americans, the campaign is coming to them only through these ads,” Freedman said. “They reach people who otherwise don’t have the time or the inclination to be plugged in to whatever’s going on with a political campaign.”

The candidates certainly know it. Through the end of July, Obama’s campaign had spent more than $152 million on advertising and related expenses, like media consultants, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog. McCain’s campaign, meanwhile, had spent nearly $54 million over the same span, CRP says.

And who would question their reasoning? If advertising can make a pair of blue jeans a symbol of social acceptance, turn a sandal into a walk down Hollywood Boulevard and transform a bottle of beer into a sexual fantasy, why would we doubt it couldn’t remake Sarah Palin into Joan of Arc? With the right image-making machine, anything is possible.

As Ginsberg said of his target audiences: “We know them better than they know themselves.”

The DNC launched a new YouTube video, “90% Bush,” arguing that McCain is just like Bush:

“Straightforward images illustrate what 90 percent really means, showing how John McCain is just more of the same,” promises a statement from the “More of the Same Media War Room.” Seriously.

The Democrats also kicked off a new anti-McCain twitter program, twitter.com/MoreoftheSame, and a new blog, justmoreofthesame.com. You can’t even talk about this strategy without saying “more of the same” five times.

In 2003, she served as director of the “Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc.,” a political boot camp for Republican women, set up by Stevens. The Trail reports that at the time Stevens disclosed the group’s existence some ethical questions cropped up:

The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reported that several experts called the group an example of the fine legal line between a legal effort to conduct political activity and then-new prohibitions against raising unlimited soft-money.

The Trail also notes that a TV ad featuring Stevens endorsing Palin disappeared from her Web site shortly after Sen. John McCain announced he had tapped her for his veep slot. During the ad, still online, Stevens says Palin is the kind of newcomer who “ought to come on and take our places.”