Posted: May 25, 2012 at 7:36 am

This Week’s Worst Political Ad

This week’s worst political ad is brought to us by none other than the Neil Livingstone for Governor campaign.

It starts with Neil Livingstone posing near a horse corral with “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” whistling to the TEA Party in the background. Livingstone doesn’t introduce himself, even though no one has even heard of him in Montana.  Instead,  Neil gives us his most important policy proposal: “introducing grey wolves into New York’s Central Park.”

After beginning with such a serious and credible opener, the ad then shifts.  Livingstone pops up into the opium-den like gloominess of a Ben Quayle ad from 2010. Quayle’s was widely mocked as one of the year’s worst. Strangely, Livingstone has also chosen to portray himself in the second half of the ad with only one arm.

Livingstone says he wants to push back against the federal government–with a creepy over emphasis on a pushback that is “HARD.”

While Quayle’s ad says he wants to go to Washington to “kick the Hell out of the place,” Livingstone simply says he wants to “tell the Feds to go to hell.”   Here’s the ad:

 

48 comments

  1. Sara

    He’s said that “introduce wolves into NY city” line frequently. I guess he thinks is so clever.

      • Turner

        Oops! You’re right, Jack. I sometimes get the names of right-wing judges mixed up. Still, the decision is a terrible one.

    • Norma Duffy AKA ILIKEWOODS

      ~Ah Man~ Like the One Commentor said: “Lemme get this straight—the federal goverment is evil, but it’s good for Montana when
      corporations from Kansas or anywhere can corrupt our elections? This is how democracy dies.”

  5. Farmboy

    Ok while I am and was against wolf re introduction. Still I do not think we need to relive this issue, and I dont think it is the most important issue in this campaign. First the wolves are here, and they are here to stay. Granted I’d be dancing in the street if a group of hunters went out and killed every last one of the dam things in this state, but still I know it ain’t gonna happen. So we learn to live with them, we manage them, we control their populations, and we kill the ones that kill our livestock or threaten our families.
    Next Livingstone’s talk is the same kind that lead to a civil war in this country, back in the 1860s. I dont want another civil war, war makes rich men rich and working men dead, its that simple. And sides where were these same people when GW Bush took the power of the federal government and used it to read our emails, and track our gun sales, and track our bank accounts, through the patriot act?
    Next we have bigger issues then the wolf, Number one unemployment in Western Montana, number 2 lack of infrastructure in eastern Montana. Number 3 the Otter Creek coal tracts. Number 4 A teachers retirement system and a public employees retirement system that is weak. Number 5. Our public employees have not had a raise in years. Come on there are bigger issues then the wolf.

  6. James Conner

    It seems to me that Livingstone is seeking the wrong job. Given his experience and status as a published expert on the pitfalls of, and the rules for, negotiating professional female companionship, he should be applying to be head of the Secret Service.

    • Norma Duffy (@Ilikewoods)

      The ground around the sign looks pretty unlevel, that could spring a go go girls ankle, and those dancing girls might might also trip in the tall grass!

      Thats okay one of the biggest Lynch signs Ive seen in Montana is on the way to the Dump here, on a dirt road outside of Dillon. Figure that one out as you wander west on Ten Mile Road!

  10. Mark Tokarski

    This is about as deep as American politics ever gets. What a shameful spectacle you all are. You honestly believe that 30 second sound bites have meaningful content. You revere the ones that manipulate you in a positive way, revile the ones that manipulate the other side in the same manner.

    Emotions are important, we all have them except a small minority (Hi Rod), but to set aside intelligent discussion of issues in full for emotional fist fights is low and disgraceful. Shame on all of you.

    Oh yeah, I forgot: we sometimes have “debates,” but the candidates set the rules and then rely on soft and compliant journalists to throw softballs their way.

    As one guy put it, I’ve forgotten his name (Harlan something) but he worked for Disney and got fired when he didn’t play by the rules, “In American society, it is not enough to be stupid. You must also be polite.” You folks are not being polite!

      • Larry Kralj, Environmental Rangers

        Some intellectual YOU are, Buttinski! You really couldn’t remember the author of The Glass Teat? Then I suppose that you also don’t remember the teacher from Winifred, Mt., that got into a big stink for teaching Ellison’s short story, I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream back in ’76. Ellison, if I remember correctly, actually came to Montana to address the Winifred school board regarding the controversy. All quite an interesting part of our history. My neighbor in Billings was a student in the class at the time and good friends with the teacher.

      • Mark Tokarski

        It was enough to know he was fired by Disney. That settled it in my mind. He’s OK. Glad to know the rest of the story.

        • Mark Tokarski

          Tone it down a notch, Norma. Who comments here is none of your concern.

                • Mark Tokarski

                  Tone it down a notch, Norma. Who comments here is none of your concern. What on earth makes you think anyone should leave here because you don’t like the comments? Are you some kind of gnome guarding the cave?

                  • Mark Tokarski

                    Let’s see, you post far more than anyone here except Kralj, and your comments are generally pointless chatter, as issues are avoided here. Yet I am a troll. If I agreed with you in all your vapid remarks, would I no longer be a troll?

                    I know you don’t agree with my comments. Is the purpose of a political blog to get rid of those who disagree with the majority? Is it just another part of our polarized political desert?

                    You would do well to get out more, read opposing views. You’re kind of boring and very predictable in your present state.

                    And remember that if everyone in a group is in agreement, that none are thinking for themselves.

                    • Lynn

                      Another Post about Mark by Mark.

                      Norma’s Posts are worth reading, yours are not

                    • Mark Tokarski

                      Then don’t read them. I’d be pleased with that. If you are part of this group, you are not thinking and are unreachable anyway.

                      Many who post here are real people – but many of these names that pop up in the comments are the “Cowgirl” – this is a Democratic boiler room operation. For that reason, it’s fun to mess with them. Their purpose is to keep you in line by assaulting you with mindless and incidental information about the other party. (“Out of state money,” an old and reliable line of political drivel, just turned up above.)

                      My purpose is to mess them up, to mess you up. I present something different, and as Norma demonstrates, small groups like this do not tolerate divergence from accepted group opinions.

                      How about you, Lynn – do you have a little tolerance in you, or are you just another mindless Democrat?

                      If you answer, you read this.

                    • Norma Duffy AKA ILIKEWOODS

                      Since I live in a country that still allows me the freeodom to pick and choose some things. The One thing I dont have to chose is Stupidity! If there was a picture that could best describe that stupidity in a dictionary, it would be you!

                      If their is one picture that could point out Pointless, dribbling chatter it would be you Mark!

                      Get lost Troll!

        • Larry Kralj, Environmental Rangers

          Synopsis
          “The story of Kathy Merrick and the forces of evil ignorance. Merrick was a high school teacher in Winifred, Montana who lost her job because she taught Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” in her junior and senior English classes. Her contract was not renewed because, she was told, she taught godless pornography. The event stirred up the Billings press, the state education association and ACLU got involved, and Ellison offered to fly up to speak on Merrick’s behalf, but the school board would admit no outside testimony. “For six years a woman who wanted to open doors for children had to wait tables to support herself.” And that is one reason Ellison hopes his readers will spring for the $744 it would take to buy air time in her area for a half-hour television documentary produced by Norman Lear’s People for the American Way called “Life and Liberty … For All Who Believe.” Ellison calls it a terrifying portrait of the Moral Majority and its methods. Various businessmen and actors had purchased air time for the show in bigger markets from New York and LA to Medford, Oregon and Lansing, Michigan. Ellison volunteered the $1,500 necessary to air it in Billings, but then found out Merrick’s home in Winifred is in the Missoula-Butte market, so he pleads with his readers to spring for that one, so that “Kathy Merrick can turn on her set one night very soon and know that someone out here gave a damn that her life was fucked up by the alien things walking the streets of God-fearing America.” (Billings certainly needed Ellison’s mistake because someone once took a shot at him when he lectured there.)”

          Comment

          • Norma Duffy AKA ILIKEWOODS

            One of my Favorite Authors is Ellison! It is terrible to hear that Freedom to read isn’t offered the children in Montana.

            I have run against this time and time again, as I raised my kids. Think about it for a second. I had to teach my kids how to fight, because they looked different to other kids. I had to promise to sue school boards that got in my childrens way because of the color of their skin. And this wasn’t the educators….. no it was the Parents on the board who I had to promise to name in suit to get them to change.

            My kids were grade A students, they were allowed to read whatever they wanted in my house. There is just no reason not to allow a kid to read The Catcher in the Rye ,American Psycho, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,The Call of the Wild, Carrie, A Clockwork Orange, A Farewell to Arms, Of Mice and Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and numerous books like them.

            Too Violent? Too Sexual? What is the world but that! Let them know that the world is not perfect and they will find their own way, with better confidence.

            Thomas Jefferson wrote: 1800 January 15. (to Charles Brockden Brown) “Some of the most agreeable moments of my life have been spent in reading works of imagination which have this advantage over history that the incidents of the former may be dressed in the most interesting form, while those of the latter must be confined to fact. They cannot therefore present virtue in the best and vice in the worst forms possible, as the former may.”

            • Larry Kralj, Environmental Rangers

              Small town Montana can INDEED be a small-minded place! I know. I’ve been there. One small town I was in FIRED their art teacher (a damn good one too) for doing an art technique with the kids in drawing class. The teacher had the kids close their eyes and try to imagine the scene they wanted to draw in their minds.

              Well, SEEMS harmless enough, right? But not for this fundiwackmentalist rightwing nusto small town! You see, by having the kids close their eyes and imagine, that is imaging! And satanic! I kid you not! And this was twenty some years ago!

              So, when you see these wackos in the Lege, know that they come by their wackiness honestly. The LIVE it! It’s sad, but unfortunately there are some pathetic inbred hillbillies out there in the hinterlands! Who knows how they got this way. I’m sure that they immigrant ancestors weren’t such fearful pathetic wackos!

  11. Idiot Savant

    Um…I watched this thing last night after dinner. Upon hearing the “introduce grey wolves to Central Park” line, Grandpa let out a rousing cheer and jumped right out of the LaZBoy, cursing the “damned out-of-state elitist environmentalists,” and concluding that once their pampered purse poodles became Scooby Snacks for the introduced Central Park grey wolf population, they’d “mind their own damned business.” As for me, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” evoked misty images of the Revolutionary War and our founding fathers. I saw the Constitution in all its revered glory flash before my eyes. But now I have a stubborn earworm and I’m mindlessly whistling, ad nauseum, snippets of that now annoying patriotic ditty last heard performed in an elementary school assembly. Guess I best put on my 45 of Starship’s classic “We Built This City” in an attempt to overwrite the infinite loop that has taken over my brain these last 24 hours. So, at the Idiot Savant manse, the commercial did have quite an impact–in contrast, I can’t remember a thing about the Rick Hill or Corey Stapleton ads that I have been seeing lately on the local news channel.

    • Mark Tokarski

      There ya go. American politics. An ad causes grandpa to jump out of his Lazy Boy, and the other politicians are not reaching him as well with their 30 second ads.

      These ads are expensive to produce. Ad agencies are highly paid professionals, and the beating heart of every agency is behavioral psychology. They know the key to any good ad is that it makes people act, not think. They don’t care what (or if) we think. So the question is how to motivate people to act.

      There are a few issues that generate feverish emotions and that will cause people to vote for or against a candidate. These issues include abortion, guns, gays and gay marriage, immigration, and apparently wolves. Keep in mind that the ad agency has no clue what the candidate might do once elected regarding these issues, and often enough the office sought has no power to even influence that issue. Wolves are a potent symbol, and so suitable for use in manipulating opinion.

  12. tom

    I think Livingstone is simply pointing out the 10th amendment to the constitution, which grandpa may have actually read and remember:

    The Tenth Amendment states “powers not granted to the federal government nor prohibited to the States by the Constitution are reserved to the States or the people.”

    Show where the constitution mentions wolf reintroduction.

    • Norma Duffy AKA ILIKEWOODS

      Tom, the constitution states nothing about the Air force or God either yet we have both. The Tenth amendment does not apply to wolves.

      In 1885, Congress created the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy with the express purpose of research for the protection of wildlife. The agency soon became the U.S. Biological Survey which was the forerunner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So the agency is well over a hundred years old.

      Elk started destroying the first national park Yellowstone in the world with overpopulation, it was decided to allow wolves back. Since the 1940′s it was discovered that not having adequate wolf populations was destroying Yellowstone, and national park lands.

      The ESA has been there since 1973 brought into existance by the last sane vestiges of the american GOP, to keep man from destroying that circle of life needed in the forests, plains, and wetlands to keep that balance in check. Cattlemen do not own public land. the american Public does.

      • Havre Voter

        Tom probably wishes we could return the U.S. to the civil war era–or before.

  14. RankinStankinRepublicans

    My, how utterly Christian of Mr. Livingstone to tell anyone to “go to hell.” The idiot actually went on video to say something like that.

    Even if he makes it out of the pack of nutballs post-primary (which he won’t, the guy is doing this so he can sell a book and probably get on the board of directors of another company or two), that comment is going to cost him more christian right votes than it will gain him in fans of the 10th amendment.

    So, will he deny all federal highway dollars? Will he tell us all to turn back our social security checks? Will he tell the FBI and Border Patrol to leave the state (or even go to Hell?). If there are wildfires raging across the state will he tell the various federal firefighting agencies to also “go to hell” when they come in to provide assistance in fire suppression?

    What an idiot. The race for “stupidest” continues onward, unabated.

  15. Tragic City

    I predict this ad campaign (which is all over the radio to the level of noise pollution FYI) will double Neil Livinstone’s votes in the primary. He’ll move from 1% to 2%.