“The year’s most offensive Super Bowl ad—and the competition was stiff—wasn’t seen in most of the country. It was from Michigan GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who’s challenging Debbie Stabenow, an incumbent Democratic senator, in the fall,” Mother Jones reported.
The ad features a (presumably) Chinese woman thanking Stabenow—whom she calls “Debbie Spend-it-now”—for spending “so much American money, you borrow more and more from us.”
“Your economy get very weak; ours get very good,” the woman says, a cunning smile spread across her face. “We take your jobs. Thank you, Debbie Spend-it-now.”
“… (I)t’s a play to racist Chinese stereotypes—simulatenously (sic) backwards, cold and calculating, anti-American, and capable of communicating only in broken English,” Mother Jones reported.
But it was James Fallows, a reporter with The Atlantic, who connected it to Jim Inhofe.
“Isn’t this special! Guy who made race-baiting Hoekstra ad is J. Inhofe’s nephew,” Fallows tweeted, posting a link to his story on the ad, as well as one to Fred Davis’—founder and chief executive of Strategic Perception Inc.—bio.
Davis began his public relations career in his father’s Tulsa firm at the age of 19 in 1972. By the time he was in his mid-20s, his three-man firm had expanded to 50 employees and boasted a client roster that included the likes of Citibank, The Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookie Company, 7-Eleven, and the U.S. Tobacco Company.
“The Unusual History of Fred Davis” reads:
Davis was drawn into the world of politics in 1994 when, after having moved his business to Los Angeles in the mid 80′s and rechristening it as Strategic Perception Inc., he received a call from his uncle, then Oklahoma Congressman James M. Inhofe, to help rescue his campaign for the U.S. Senate. Hired three months prior to the election, when polls showed Inhofe as a 15-point underdog to Congressman Dave McCurdy, Inhofe won the election by 15 points, a 30-point swing in 90 days.
Inhofe and fellow Oklahoman John Sullivan have both handed over their campaigns to Davis, as have other successful Republican lawmakers.
He was responsible for five of Time Magazine’s Best Viral Campaign Ads of 2010, and he’s the guy who compared President Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in one of John McCain’s ads. That campaign notwithstanding, he’s made many a Republican a happy—and (re-)elected—man.
“John Sullivan, U.S. Congressman from Tulsa, was re-elected by an overwhelming majority in trying times,” Davis’ website boasts. “Sullivan was shown in his ads as budget conscious in his personal life as well as his professional life, even sleeping on an air mattress in his D.C. office. Sadly for John, a true story.”
But Fallows—and others—are hoping Davis and Hoekstra have less success with this campaign.
“The ad’s words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about — ‘Nam!!,” he wrote. “Of course, some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China… (I)t offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.
“This ad is embarrassing for America! Regardless of party, I hope it loses Hoekstra more votes than it wins him.”
Representive Hoekstra, however, defended the ad before Fox news.
““There’s nothing in here that has a racial tint at all,” he said. “But the bottom line is, when Debbie Stabenow and them can’t defend their record, what they’ll typically move to is the race card.”
—Holly Wall, News Editor
