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Saturday, October 18, 2008
Joe the Plumber had a grating Georgia precedent
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You must be this tall, and at least 40 years old to read the following post:
Democratic veteran Ed Kilgore this week took Joe the Plumber and connected him to one of the most gratingly effective avatars — Kilgore’s word — in modern Georgia political history.
Read the entire piece here. But here’s a truncated appetizer:
After writing my last two posts, about the ludicrous Joe the Plumber scam and the probably-bogus “tightening presidential contest,” I had a dark thought. What if McCain somehow pulls this out? My God, it’ll be attributed to Joe the Plumber! And we’ll see a lot more of this kind of stupid stunt in the future.”
Due to the eternal popularity of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy (after this, therefore because of this), which confuses coincidence with causation, copy-catting questionable political gimmicks is a very common phenomenon….
[A] vivid example of questionably successful gimmickry, similar in its fundamental stupidity to the Joe the Plumber furor, occurred in my home state of Georgia in 1992. A Republican warhorse, Paul Coverdell, was running against incumbent Democratic Senator Wyche Fowler. For most of the campaign, Fowler maintained a large and steady lead in the polls. One day, according to the legend, a beehived grandmother from South Georgia named Margie Lopp called up Coverdell HQ and sang them a campaign jingle she had composed.
Now Margie’s jingle was not only content-free (its deepest line was : “Let’s put Paul Coverdell in the Senate and put Wyche Fowler out!”), but gratingly annoying in a bad nursery rhyme sort of way. For whatever reason, the Coverdell campaign made it the sole sum and substance of about ten thousand radio and television ads. Political observers universally mocked it, and even Coverdell’s staff later admitted they were flooded with calls from supporters complaining about it.
But lo and behold, on Election Night, Coverdell ran surprisingly well, and though Fowler ran ahead of him, an archaic Georgia law requiring a majority of the general election vote for victory knocked the incumbent into a rare runoff. I’ll never forget watching local election coverage from the Coverdell party, where a gaggle of young Republicans were defiantly singing the Lopp classic…..
I recently ran across a semi-academic article quoting Coverdell campaign staff as suggesting that the jingle boosted their candidate’s name ID in an insidious way. I suppose this is the same theory by which some advertisers deliberately screen obnoxious ads that consumers at least remember (a theory I try to fight by, for example, swearing I will never buy insurance from GEICO until it not only kills but apologizes for its interminable “caveman” series). But it’s a dubious proposition at best.
