The Ron Sparks Campaign Has Had Too Much Caffeine

by: countrycat

Tue Mar 02, 2010 at 13:13:52 PM CST

That's the most charitable excuse I can come up with for the campaign's latest flurry of semi-hysterical press releases.  Mooncat has already discussed the "Man Without A Plan" email series, noting:

I swear, these missives make me downright nostalgic for the emails of former campaign manager Justin Saia, which were not sufficiently appreciated at the time.

These latest emails make me nostalgic for Dick and Jane readers. The grammar was better; there were pictures; and the stories were easier to follow.

In the past 24 hours, the Sparks campaign has sent three more emails with these titles:

• Day 7: Still No Funding Plan
• Day 8: Still No Funding Plan
  
• Artur Gives Big Breaks to Oil, Credit Card Companies

Today's latest is a treasure trove of logical fallacies.  In fact, the fallacy part is the only thing "logical" about the allegations contained in the email:

Ron Sparks has never taken money from large corporations and turned around to vote the way they wanted him to vote. (Appeal to Motive, Judgmental Language, Poisoning the Well --- and, by the way, the Agriculture Commissioner doesn't have a vote on anything.)

“I'm here to stand up for working Alabamians, not to punish them because some big company gave me money to do what they wanted me to do,” (Appeal to Emotion) Sparks said. “My vote will never be for sale like Artur Davis'. The only people I'll listen to when making decisions are the people of Alabama.”

Davis has yet to respond to the fact he sold his votes in Congress.  (Fallacy of Many Questions .. aka... "loaded question" like: "When did you stop beating your wife?" ...often used rhetorically, so that the question limits direct replies to those that serve the questioner's agenda.)

And those are just the ones that jumped out at me on the first reading.  Ok... so we understand that campaign literature is, at its heart, a form of propaganda.  Not in a bad sense, but because the campaign is deliberately using information to try and influence the opinions of others and encourage them to reach a predetermined outcome.

However, good campaign literature - even attack pieces - provides background and context for the information presented.  Just throwing around wild charges and innuendo is more of a characteristic of a bad blog post than a professional campaign communication. 

This reminds me of the fall of 2008 when crazy relatives kept sending me those "Obama is a Muslim who won't salute the flag and isn't even a citizen" emails.

Truly, the latest Sparks campaign emails are so bad that it's hard to critique them seriously instead of just ridiculing them.

The first thing that jumped out at me in Day 7 & Day 8's emails was the LACK of a campaign logo and full color layout of the campaign's initial emails.

Compare the look and feel of the former and latter:

If I were Ron Sparks, I wouldn't want my campaign logo on these last couple either.

The headline of Day 7 contains a typo:

Artur Davis:  No Money for YOU

Lot’s of Big Oil, Credit Card Money for HIM

Sells  His Vote While Sticking it to US

"Lot's" should be "Lots" because it's not possessive or a contraction.  Remember that Day 1's release spelled "college" wrong.  Again, I ask: "How hard is it to spell check a press release?"

Obviously, a campaign not bothering with the easy work of spell checking is even more unlikely to do the heavy lifting required to fact check a press release.

And they don't provide enough information for anyone else to do it either.

Both of these press releases attack Davis for specific votes in Congress but fail to provide the dates, bill numbers, or any other identifying information that would allow a reporter to quickly verify the accuracy of the claims:

From Day 7 -

$37,000 dollars from Big Oil to Artur and he gives them a $25 billion tax break.

$259,000 from credit card companies to Artur and then he votes to gut consumer protection for us.

From Day 8, an even less specific charge - 

Gets in bed with Big Oil?

Gets in bed with credit card companies?

Sold out the voters in his district.  Sold out the people of Alabama.  Sold his soul for money.

 If he sleeps with THEM, who else will Artur Exxon Davis be sleeping with?

As I've noted before, the continuing references to Davis by his first name seem to be a rather childish attempt to de-legitimize him as a Congressman and candidate.

Which is actually much less offensive than the creepy use of sexual innuendos peppered throughout the text of both emails:

• "in bed with"  used 4 times
• "sleeps with" or "slept with" used 2 times
• "stuck it to" or "sticking it to" used 3 times
  

And these were short press releases!

What's next, guys?  A reprise of the classic Blazing Saddles scene - only this time with an Artur Davis impersonator playing Cleavon's Little's role and asking: "Where the white women at?"

Oddly, the full text of these "press releases" isn't available at the campaign Web site.  It doesn't appear that the news or event pages have been updated since December 2009.

That's unfortunate, because the quality of the writing and reasoning in this latest set of press releases could be used as a textbook case of a campaign that appears to be in disarray and decline.  

Day 8's allegation that Davis has "...proven there is no bottom" smacks of projection (used in the psychological sense).  Because this latest round of emails tells me that the Sparks campaign has HIT bottom, scraped the bottom out of the barrel -  and quite possibly is prepared to sink even lower into the mud.

It's a sad thing to see such a promising candidate flail about like this.