Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Herman Cain has been putting out some of the weirdest presidential campaign web ads this cycle. They are meant to attract the attention of the D.C. media villagers and Beltway bloviators to get them talking about his web ad in order to get some free air time. The media villagers took the bait hook, line and sinker for the video below released on Tuesday. They are so easily manipulated.
I can just hear Cain saying, "I don't care what you say about me, just spell my name right," in the old adage that "any news is good news" if it builds name ID. Cain will not like what I say about him.
Huffington Post's Jason Linkins broke down the latest theories on the Cain campaign's decision to have Block light up a cigarette:
Why do this? The Buffalo Beast's Ian Murphy speculates that Mark Block, who "was, until recently, the Wisconsin State Director of Americans for Prosperity," is just giving a shout out to AFP's generous funders from the tobacco industry. Cain has also worked closely with cigarette manufacturers in the past. As the head of the National Restaurant Association, he lobbied against higher cigarette taxes and smoking bans in restaurants.
I previously posted about Cain's ties to the Koch brothers AFP and Mark Block. Herman Cain, Trojan horse candidate for the Koch brothers:
AFP tapped Cain as the public face of its “Prosperity Expansion Project,” and he traveled the country in 2005 and 2006 speaking to activists who were starting state-based AFP chapters from Wisconsin to Virginia. Through his AFP work he met Mark Block, a longtime Wisconsin Republican operative hired to lead that state’s AFP chapter in 2005 as he rebounded from an earlier campaign scandal that derailed his career.
Block and Cain sometimes traveled together as they built up AFP: Cain was the charismatic speaker preaching the ills of big government; Block was the operative helping with nuts and bolts.
Block is now Cain’s campaign manager.
A few reporters were quick enough to recognize this ad is an homage to the shadowy figure The Cigarette Smoking Man character in the TV series X Files. Here is a clip from the classic "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" that is a prophetic warning about this candidate from Koch: there are shadowy figures operating behind Cain.
Personally, I would have gone with the classic anti-Forrest Gump "Life is like a box of chocolates" speech from "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man." This would have kept the media villagers speculating for weeks.
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