February 7, 2012

Chrysler is Just Trying to Sell You a Car, Okay?

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Matt Yglesias on the Chrysler Super Bowl ad that seems to have Karl Rove and the right-wing outrage machine in an uproar:

Apparently Clint Eastwood is personally upset that some people took Chrysler’s “halftime in America” to be a positive commentary on the Obama administration.

This seems totally untenable to me. Whether Eastwood or Chrysler executives like to talk about it, the company—currently enjoying double-digit sales growth—would not currently exist today if not for the Obama administration…Whether you like what he did or not, there’s no denying its impact. The automobile industry of the upper Midwest is still with us specifically because Team Obama chose to ensure that it would remain there.

I don’t get this. It’s yet another one of those things that I see, think nothing of at the time, and then subsequently learn has become a cause celebre.1 To me, this just seemed like an ad for Chrysler, very much in line with their campaign of the entire past year, which revolves around the “comeback” of Motor City and the grit and hard work that made it possible. I don’t know if that’s a good advertising theme or not, but it’s the one they chose.

To say that Chrysler’s ad is a commentary on Obama because Chrysler got bailed out is to say that every Chrysler ad is implicitly a commentary on Obama. Ditto for every Citibank ad and every AIG ad. That’s crazy. They’re ads for cars, bank accounts, and insurance policies. I think Jon Cohn probably has the right take here:

I have no idea whether Rove really believes Chrysler produced that ad in order to do President Obama a political favor.2 But the fact that he and other Republicans are so worked up could mean that they are scared—not of the advertisement itself, but of the themes it contains.

Those themes are optimism and national pride. As Salon‘s Joan Walsh noted on the Ed Show Monday evening, Republicans have basically owned those themes since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan won an election with them. But lately President Obama has been the one making the case that it’s morning in America or, at least, just before dawn. He did it in the State of the Union and he’s done it in a series of major speeches since.

…If the recovery continues, Obama will have a pretty powerful claim to reelection: That his economic policy choices, made in the face of fierce Republican opposition, are paying off. Rove knows this as well as anybody. I suspect that’s the real reason he’s so angry.

Yep. I suspect so, too.

1For the record, this happens to me nearly as often on the left as on the right.

2Actually, I think we do have a pretty good idea. He doesn’t.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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