Let me present to you the amazing amount of scrutiny that apparently needs to go into a Barack Obama campaign ad, just to understand what it actually means.
- Level Minus One. This is the scrutiny that is done by the creators of the ad itself (that is to say, none at all). Summary of said ad (second video at this Hot Air link): this Brian Slagle fellow from Ohio was in the auto industry; he got laid off; but he has a job, now; and thank God for that nice Obama fellow, who made it all possible.
- Level Zero. This was the scrutiny done by ABC News. They discovered that the company that Mr. Slagle works for now (Johnson Controls) apparently frittered away a lot of its stimulus money then; is actually laying off people now; and is currently being investigated for employee health violations. As in, lead poisoning. In other words; it’s not that great a job, and there’s some question about whether its employees are better off with the company still being in business. I mean. Lead poisoning.
- Level One. This is the scrutiny done by The Weekly Standard: in short, actual fact-checking. It turns out that Mr. Slagle has been employed by Johnson Controls… since 2006. This information could be found via the arcane method of “looking up Brian Slagle on Facebook:” the information has since been removed, but TWS took screenshots, of course. Translation: Brian Slagle did not actually get a new job from Obama’s stimulus program. They want you to think that he did, but he didn’t*.
All of which means that the actual message of the ad is “I had a job in the auto industry until about six years ago… and then I got a new job. Which is apparently one with a bad environmental and fiscal record, but that doesn’t matter! That’s because Barack Obama really, really needs me to get on the screen and tell you how great it is for me as a spectator to see the auto industry get bailed out. So I figure that I’m golden… oh, crud, Facebook. But… they promised me that Republicans couldn’t read!”
Which, admittedly, doesn’t really sing as a campaign message.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*This is, by the way, what campaigns do when they don’t actually have anything useful to run on.