Dog on a leash?
Political commercials more fiction than fact
Last updated Monday, October 16, 2006 8:48 PM CDT in Columns
By John Brummett
If there's one thing on which I'll defer to Gov. Mike Huckabee, it's the killing of animals. Sheffield Nelson has called our lame-duck chief executive a "man's man" because he's so adept at hunting game. Ducks Unlimited just named Huckabee the sportsman of the year. You might have read that the governor recently went out west and assassinated an antelope from considerable distance.
So I listened with respectful interest the other day as Huckabee told me that Mike Beebe's television commercial with the camouflage and the waders and the water and the gun and the Labrador retriever was comically awry.
The dog was on a leash, Huckabee said. There's no way a real hunter would trudge through the water or in or out of the woods with his dog tethered, or so our governor -- master of the regal black Lab named Jet -- propounded.
Having only days before asked the Beebe campaign whether the candidate had dyed his hair, which he hadn't, I ventured back with yet another substantive inquiry: whether and why that dog was on a leash.
Twice in a week I had to convince Beebe's press secretary that I wasn't drunk.
The press secretary opened his laptop and located the commercial, which mostly aired on cable stations. He e-mailed it to me with an invitation to look for myself and freeze the frame to determine whether Huckabee needed to have his eyes checked.
Indeed, it appeared to me, as it had to Beebe's press secretary, that the dog, a pretty chocolate Lab, was heeling untethered and that what Beebe had in his hand was a string of ducks.
Bear in mind that these images aren't vivid, since all this takes place in the woods.
OK. I'm done with the ducks. I'm done with the dog. I'm done with the hair. And I'm still waiting for a Republican, any Republican, to land a solid blow on Beebe, substantive or otherwise.
Another thing: Huckabee had dared me to inquire whether that was really Beebe's dog. I responded by asking the governor if that was really Jimmie Lou Fisher driving that all-terrain vehicle and slinging mud in one of the governor's famous television commercials four years ago. He said "absolutely," but he was, of course, kidding.
Here's a little scoop: Political commercials on television are made up.
Do you think Asa Hutchinson normally sits around all by himself at the back of a school bus? Was Asa really doing some weeding that day and the camera just happened upon him in time to pick up his musing on the subject of Johnson grass as a simile for taxes? And why is Bill Halter spending so much time with his old football coach? Did he really perform all 50 of those push-ups, or just the two until the camera faded?
This staged and bogus imagery is so prevalent that the relevant question devolves to whether these ads amount to outright frauds or simply to benign fictions.
Beebe's not much of a duck hunter; he's a golfer who has hunted deer and birds. The point of the spot in question is that he's culturally connected to Arkansawyers and can be trusted not to take anybody's firearm.
Hutchinson doesn't really spend time alone on a school bus and he's not been engaged lately snuffing out weeds. But he does intend, if elected governor, to keep rural schools open and cut the grocery tax.
Halter is trying to say he's a normal guy with strong Arkansas ties.
P.S. The essential Democratic strategy to prove gun-friendliness always gets ridiculed by Republicans. Mark Pryor put out a pamphlet in 2002 featuring a picture of him firing a gun into the air. Tim Hutchinson's people told me that Pryor was aiming too low and too high for any kind of game bird they knew. I presume, then, that Mark missed, except on Election Day.
About this columnist
John Brummett has been writing about Arkansas and national politics for three decades and as a regular columnist since 1986. Email Brummett at jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.
Click here to read his blog.
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Beebe wins wrote on Oct 17, 2006 4:31 PM: