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Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Perdue’s ‘moving forward’ ad
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sponsor: Gov. Sonny Perdue re-election campaign
The ad: The new ad begins with a series of rewinds, from a plane flying backward and children walking backward onto a school bus to Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, Perdue’s re-election opponent, walking backward down steps. “Georgia was moving in the wrong direction. We were losing jobs, huge deficits, blaming our teachers. Our leaders weren’t listening.� Then the footage is reversed with the words, “Then we elected Sonny, and Georgia turned around. Started moving forward.� It cuts to more happy scenes, from a smiling construction worker and traffic moving to Perdue shaking hands and an announcer saying, “Two hundred thousand new jobs, SAT scores on the rise, our deficit became a surplus. People felt like they mattered again. Sonny is moving Georgia forward. Why would we ever go back?� The last phrase rolls out as two barefoot children run in a grassy front yard toward their home.
The reality: This is a visually catchy ad that, rather than being strictly fact-filled, is aimed more at convincing voters that Georgia is moving in the right direction. When Perdue ran in 2002, the economy was in a post-Sept. 11 funk and then-Gov. Roy Barnes was seen by some as having insulted teachers in the process of passing a pair of massive school reform laws in 2000 and 2001. Since the national economy was relatively weak, Perdue took office facing a shortfall. There wasn’t a “huge deficit,� as the ad claims, because the Georgia Constitution doesn’t allow the state to run a deficit. However, Perdue did have a budget that had $640 million more in planned spending than expected revenues, so he spent down the state reserves, raised cigarette taxes and approved spending cuts, some of which had begun under Barnes. Perdue has touted the figure of 200,000 new jobs created, but Georgia’s unemployment rate has topped the national average at times during his term, something that hasn’t happened much in the past few decades. Scores on the SAT have increased since Perdue took office, but not at as fast a rate as during previous years. And the combined score on math and English fell this year. Since there was no deficit, he hasn’t turned it into a surplus. However, thanks to a national economy that is better off than it was in 2002, he has rebuilt the reserves to near pre-2003 levels and tax collections have been boosted, allowing him to increase state spending by about $2.5 billion annually over when he took office. Although the ad uses moving traffic as one of the metaphors for Georgia moving forward, metro Atlanta traffic hasn’t gotten any better, but that’s been the same story for decades.
See the ad: www.votesonny.com
