Adam Hanft's SpinSeason.

Both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney are betting much of their Strawpollian lives on commercials that feature the spouse trot. It’s a questionable strategy, one that’s transparently manipulative and likely to reinforce the candidate’s existing supporters rather than bring in the undecided.

Each of them are not-so-subtle attacks on Newt Gingrich’s wandering eye, and his roly-poly body that has historically been not too far behind.

Romney’s spot goes for the jugular in the most obvious fashion. Anne Romney hammers the message that peccadilloes are a presidential non-starter by saying “You can never predict what kind of tough decisions are going to come in front of a president’s desk. But if you can trust they will do the right thing…if you really want to know how a person will operate, look at how they’ve lived their life.”

Of course, that’s completely specious reasoning that is agnostic of politics, given that ghastly decisions have been made by uxorious Commanders-in-Chief, and brilliant ones by those who were led around by their own chief commander.

She closes by going as close to nuclear on Newt as a putative First Lady can get “…I think that’s why it’s so important to understand the character of a person. To mean that make a huge difference. Maybe to some voters it doesn’t. But to me it makes a huge difference.”

Meanwhile, Rick Perry’s spot features his wife Anita, sporting some serious big-hair that reinforces their Texas cred, the one element of his candidacy that is in no need of any validation.

She recounts their courting and marriage as “…an old-fashioned American story, I married my high school sweetheart.” Then she causes some Christopher Hitchens grave-turning – I’m actually pleased that his ire is being raised so shortly after his demise – by saying “…we grew up in small towns, raised with Christian values…and we know Washington D.C. could use some of that.”

At the end of the spot, Rick enters the frame unexpectedly – Gawker called it a cat-like pounce and says with the faintest of chuckles that he “really approves this message.”

It’s an attempt at humor and intimacy that falls flat as a tortilla made by an illegal immigrant.  It also reinforces Perry’s lack of gravitas, and highlights the struggle that political consultants find themselves in these days, as they navigate between the need to show warmth and humanity, and to project leadership.

Will these spots – and others that are bashing Gingrich work?  An evangelical group in Iowa has sent around a video that’s makes Perry’s and Romney’s spots look like subtle poofs.  It’s a high-energy accounting of his debauchery, calling him the “Kim Kardashian” of the GOP.

Romney should be more worried about Paul in Iowa, and should defer attacking Gingrich until later.  If Paul wins, Romney gets embarrassed and his inevitability gets seriously dinged.  Meanwhile, most polls show Gingrich in third place anyway, running behind Romney and Paul  – who are in a dead-heat according Nate Silver in the New York  Times, and few points ahead of Bachman.  The Times gives him a 9% chance of winning the straw poll.

Romney is making real strategic mistake.  (For Perry, it doesn’t really matter, his candidacy is done.)  What’s more, Gingrich’s true vulnerability here and elsewhere isn’t his multiple infidelities as much as a perception of high-beta emotionalism in general.  He’s off the peak of his polls, but if Romney, Perry continue to go after his spousal problems, it will backfire and highlight their individual weaknesses: Romney’s smooth and potentially fatal judgmentalism and holier-than-thou-ness, and Perry’s trigger-happy superficiality.

There are some people who believe a cheater is a cheater – falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus, as they say in Latin – and others who can compartmentalize.  Those mental framings are fixed, and money spent to shift them is money wasted.

President Obama is generally getting strong reviews for his speech last night, and I think he did a fine job of calling the nation to a higher purpose. There were even some moments when his rhetoric spread its wings, as when he urged us to “expand our moral imaginations.” Although there was nothing that came close to Peggy Noonan’s words written for Ronald Reagan, and spoken on the day the Challenger astronauts perished:

“We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”

My issue, though, is that while the America the president describes might be the one he and his tight circle of advisors inhabit, it is not the one I see, or that most Americans do. The White House is in a bubble that magnifies the partisanship, the incivility, and the coarseness of the conversation. It is not surprising that from his point-of-view “our discourse has become so sharply polarized” that “we are far too easy to lay the blame for all that ails at the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do.”

But most American do not reside in a Manicheistic world that cleaves into an Olbermann/O’Reilly divide. There are over 200 million adults in America, and only a small fraction of them – like 3% – are regularly watching the cable programs that burn with heated rhetoric.

In fact, it’s the other way around. As the Pew Report puts it:

“Centrism has emerged as a dominant factor in public opinion as the Obama era begins. Both political parties have lost adherents since the election and an increasing number of Americans identify as independents. {In fact} The proportion of independents now equals its highest level in 70 years.”

The fact that most Americans are in the middle, that millions of us are rejecting the dogmatism of the two major parties, belies the description of the country that Obama put forth yesterday. The reality is that there aren’t many Americans for whom politics is the ultimate lens through which they see the world. There are only a handful, in fact, of those who will view the events in Tucson as a platform for ideological debate. When President Obama warns against speaking “…on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle” he is speaking from his own struggles and wounds, but isn’t capturing the mood of the vast majority of Americans – those for whom he should speak.

Outside of the dysfunctional world of the Beltway, or the absurd demonization of political advertising, or the ratings hunt that drives cable TV to ever-increasing heights of manufactured hysteria, or the rants of noisy but ultimately small groups of flame-throwers, most of “us” go about our lives with a level of civility and tolerance of differing political perspectives that doesn’t chime with the portrait of America painted last night. I am well aware that the Tea Party was the elephant in the room in Arizona – but it’s a mistake to turn its emergence, and its spotty performance in November, into a proxy for American attitudes.

Yes, the president is right on one level. Who can argue that we should “listen to each other more carefully” and “pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” But last night, he made broad and sweeping generalizations that are inaccurate summations of the current state of American society; his implicit use of Fox and MSNBC and radio talk shows as proxies for our state-of-mind is as mistaken as any political stereotyping, whether it be immigrants as dangerous criminals or government workers as lazy sloths.

I understand why the president used the meme of a polarized nation as his foil. Creating an opposing framework is a classic rhetorical device. But in doing so, in misreading the true nature of American character, he actually credentialized the extreme voices – those on the angry right and angry left – who view the world in exactly the same way he describes. The “we” the president chose as his rhetorical peg is far, far less universal than the pronoun itself signifies.

The New York City Health Department isn’t full of wussy, controversy-averse, fear-of-offending bureaucrats, that’s for sure.  They’re responsible for a AIDS-prevention TV spot that is gutsy, tabloidy, and has riled up some segments of the gay community.

The spot, which as been likened to a “horror movie trailer” has a simple message:  “It’s never just HIV.”   Concerned that condom use is waning because HIV is becoming a manageable, medicable condition – no longer a death sentence – public health authorities decided to scare men into compliance with some new information.

Here’s the text:

“When you get HIV, it’s never just HIV. You’re at a higher risk to get dozens of other diseases–even if you take medications–like osteoporosis, a disease that dissolves your bones, and dementia, a condition that causes permanent memory loss. And you’re over 28 times more likely to get anal cancer. It’s never just HIV. Stay HIV free. Always use a condom.”

It’s not exactly artful, and it does feel like it was produced by the same people who crank out the political spots that warn of the dangers of invading immigrants and job-snatching Chinese. But it’s unmissable.

Some gay groups have complained that the commerical “stigmatizes victims.” Francisco Roque of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis said that:

“It really paints this picture of gay men as these sort of disease-ridden vessels, and so the message is really sort of, ‘Stay away from gay men.’”

The Health Department stands by the message, and Larry Kramer, the gay activist, thinks it’s just great, writing;

“This ad is honest and true and scary, all of which it should be. HIV is scary, and all attempts to curtail it via lily-livered nicey-nicey ‘prevention’ tactics have failed.”

The GMHC has it all wrong.  The New York City Health Department is the health department, not the Human Rights Department.  It has very specific mission: to save lives.  If they think that showing graphic footage of anal cancer will do that, then that’s what they should be doing.  Just like their controversial anti-soft drink campaign – the one that showed blubber being poured out of a soda bottle – stigmatized fat people.

Mayor Bloomberg has taken a lot of flack for his efforts to regulate healthy living, and has been accused of being the Nanny Mayor for intervention in everything from trans fats to salt to the posting of calories in fast-food restaurants.  (Though the long-term results are unclear, a Stanford study did find that people consume fewer calories when confronted with the frightening numerical impact of a whomping-big bacon cheese construction project.)

While I generally recoil at government attempts to influence the personal decisions we make, I find Bloomberg’s muscular fashioning of his role to be admirable in many respects, if only for his refusal to accept the immutability of human behavior.

For as long as I can remember, public service advertising, whether it be from the health department or any other government agency, has been bland, and toothless, sandpapered down to harmless rounded edges by fearful functionaries.  That Bloomerg’s Health Department had the courage to create the HIV commercial, or an earlier spot that graphically presented the dangers of smoking, is profoundly commendable.

If other municipalities had the guts to create media messages that were actually capable of changing behavior – whether it be to get parents to read to their kids, or save for retirement, or to keep credit card debt down to a reasonable level – we’d piss off a lot of people, and be a better society for it.

If you thought Election Day provided a break from the unsparing torrent of political and issue advertising we’ve all experienced, you might want to reconsider your optimism.

Last week, a liberal religious group called the American Values Network launched a campaign that imagines the global disaster that could befall us if the START treaty isn’t ratified by the Senate.  (Why a liberal group would give itself a name that sounds exactly like one of those kitschy, sanctimonious monikers favored by right-wing groups is beyond me.)

Also beyond me is why they decided to make their argument by “updating” Lyndon Johnson’s classic but freighted 1964 Daisy commercial that ran just one time, but has become legendary among the commentariat.  Daisy II is a failed exercise in self-referential media recursion.

Here’s the START ad, followed by its inspiration.

The original spot – launched in the fiery heat and nuclear paranoia of the Cold War – was breathtaking in its power.  Goldwater was being portrayed by the media as trigger-happy, and LBJ’s commercial connected that stereotype to our deepest fears.  Miraculously, it did so without making Johnson come across as “weak” on defense, a charge that has haunted the Democrats to this very day. (And this very treaty extension.)

Those who analyze Daisy I typically focus on the extraordinary power of the visual concept, and the audio track that cross-fades the little girl’s petal counting with a missile countdown.   So it’s easy to overlook the way LBJ wraps it all up at the end, quoting Auden in the process.

“These are the stakes.

To make a world in a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.

We must either love each other, or we must die.”

How shocking to hear a president – and not just any president, but LBJ, who became a failed war president  –  speaking in the ancient days of 1964 in a syntax of such pre-hippie innocence.

But Daisy II is a commercial lacking any of that emotional payload.  Those who know the referent, and I’d have to say that’s less than 10% of the viewing public, will struggle to make the connection.  It’s a long road of cerebration between the fear of Goldwater with his finger on the button, and terrorists getting their hands on loose nukes in the absence of U.S. inspectors on the ground in Russia.  (If you don’t know the original spot, the new one simply fees out of joint.)

Here’s how Daisy II tries valiantly to make the logical connection:

“In a world where terrorists seek to destroy everything we hold dear, Russia’s nuclear weapons cannot be left un-monitored.”

This simply packs too much together.  The nexus between START’s provisions – and the vulnerability of Russia’s nuclear weapons stockpile – is a complex and winding argument.  After all, the issue of Russian “loose nukes” getting into the hands of terrorists isn’t directly part of the START treaty.

But if START is rejected or set back, it will damage the mutual U.S. and Russian efforts to secure those weapons. Foreign Policy reports that Senator Lugar has criticized his Republican colleagues for threatening to delay START ratification using that argument:

“Lugar also warned that the failure to ratify the treaty could have drastic consequences for other facets of the U.S.-Russia nuclear cooperation – especially the Nunn-Lugar effort to secure loose nuclear materials throughout the Soviet Union.

‘There are still thousands of missiles out there.  You better get that through your heads,’ he said, directing his comments to members of his own party.”

American Values Network is spending good money on a good cause in a bad way.  They should be making Lugar’s argument with a twist – that we can’t rely on Russia to protect our nuclear weapons and without START we will lose our ability to secure them.

As the Council on Foreign Relations has noted, Russian authorities have “broken up hundreds of nuclear-materials smuggling deals.”   This is scary stuff, far more shocking and anxiety-provoking than the abstraction of Daisy II. That’s why the Obama administration was able to corral a clutch of bi-partisan eminence geezers to support START ratification, including Kissinger, Baker, Albright, and Scowcroft.

It would have been far more effective to take a documentary approach – the way PBS with their Frontline show about loose nukes. The scenes of unguarded nuclear missiles in a post-9/11 world are far more compelling than 1964’s greatest hits.