tim pawlenty, action hero

The best/worst ad of the 2012 campaign is upon us. A little background: Tim Pawlenty is a mild-mannered former Republican governor of Minnesota, soon to announce his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination. Few dislike Pawlenty - he's a nice, moderate kinduva guy with a reasonable governing record. His problem is that he's not well known, and easily forgotten. Those that do know of him put him somewhere near Calvin Coolidge on the charisma scale. He's a kind of American John Major.

Pawlenty, no fool he, is intently aware of his problem. He knows that nice is not enough. So the brief for this ad must have been: let's inject some excitement, some action, some goddamn sex into the Pawlenty brand!

And - oh my - just look what they came up with...

It's a wonder they don't show him engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a bearded terrorist, and growling "Get off my plane...!"

My tip to Pawlenty: if you're going with the action hero thing, lose the 'Tim'.

Comments

[Kyle]

Holy balls, this commercial makes me want to skullfuck Iran, bend Kim Jong-Il over my knee, buy thirty-eight copies of Atlas Shrugged, and vote for a Republican for president for the first time in my life.

[David]

I like the bit at the end which says available now or as we would say, jobless.

[Ejoch]

Even if every ad man in the room had a sudden irony failure that day, wouldn't the moment where the rocket goes off in the soundtrack wake them up??? Oh my lord. I wish I hadn't known what it was... if I'd seen it by accident would have been fun guessing whether it was made by John Stewart/bored hollywood trailer-maker/any Democrat.

Now Mitch Daniels has more sense.I hope:)

[Lyle]

Anyone else notice that every single face is white in the fleeting present-day images? Everything else about this (ridiculous, hilarious) advert is so slick. They even show Tim chatting to a dude in a wheelchair. How could they forget to pepper the advert with some Latino, African, and Asian faces? Looks so vanilla. And yet...so thrilling. SuperTim powers, activate!