West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller had to be pleased with the still-roiling Clint Eastwood spot in Sunday’s Super Bowl. As a Democrat, the clear pro-Obama message about auto bailouts helping
save Detroit was surely welcome, but there was a little-noticed shot at cable news that may have heartened him more.
At a 2010 Senate hearing, the senator took the opportunity to launch into a
completely unrelated diatribe about the Hannitys and Maddows – and their dogmatic guests -- sowing division.
“I’m tired of the right and the left,” he said.
“There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to Fox and to MSNBC: out, off, end, goodbye."
Midway through Eastwood’s Chrysler spot, there was a grainy
TV image of a man pointing angrily that resembled a railing “analyst” on one of the cable networks. It only lasted about a second, but spoke loudly.
“It seems like
we’ve lost our heart at times,” said Eastwood in the voiceover. “When the fog of division, discord and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead."
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The message was clear:
Democrat vs. Republican anger on a split screen isn’t going to move the ball on solving the health care crisis or yielding energy independence.
In Sunday's ad, the Fox/MSNBC take-off was
followed by a controversial shot of a protest outside the Wisconsin state capitol. Then, Eastwood moved on to how he’s seen tough times before and Americans have traditionally “rallied
around what was right, and acted as one," so it's time to do that bonding again.
(Good luck with that Clint in an election year with super PACs ready to throw bombs and Fox News, MSNBC and CNN
eager for partisanship to goose ratings.)
If cable news networks cared about blame lobbed their way in the ad about breeding division, they had shaken it off by the monring – gladly
offering up a platform for more division.
Obama adviser David Axelrod called the spot "powerful" on Twitter after it ran. But, GOP strategist Karl Rove went on Fox News and seemed to electrify
the debate. He said he was “offended” by the spot. He said it amounted to a de facto Obama campaign spot, where auto companies felt an obligation to repay the president for the cash
infusion.
The relishing White House joined the discussion talking about how the Chrysler and GM bailouts were aimed at holding onto jobs and setting the stage for domestic automakers to
compete globally.
On MSNBC, a guest host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” all but suggested the agency that created the ad, Wieden + Kennedy, had succeeded in crafting a cogent message
that the Obama camp had struggled with. Historian Michael Beschloss did say on the show he thought the spot was "probably helpful to Obama,” but he did note that it acknowledged people are
hurting and scared.
Eastwood for his part surfaced to tell Fox News’s “O’Reilly Factor” that the ad was a no spin zone and had no political intentions, though he
encouraged politicians who want to use the ad as an inspiration to fight for job growth and recovery to do it.
Sen. Rockefeller would support that, but say Fox News and MSNBC won’t help
bring any change.