When Republicans Attack

Previous McCain ads we’ve analyzed embed distorted images of Barack Obama. But no ad so gleefully defaced Obama’s image as did McCain’s ad “Acorn.” The official ad has been removed  from YouTube because of a copyright claim by Fox News, but it has been copied and uploaded by other YouTube members. (Note: the full embedded video below has different footage than the edited version we present. In the full version from PoliticalWazoo, Obama points to a blackboard. In the version we downloaded from JohnMcCain.com, and portions of which we include below the full video, Obama stands to the right of a series of posters with large X’s.)

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Here is an edited version, with the Obama images that have been distorted, in most cases by hyperkinetic abstract swirls of color:

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Here is the same footage, slowed down from 30 frames per second to 5 fps (the audio commentary is not synchronized with the video):

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Even at the slow speed, the final gimmick of the video may not register on the viewers’ consciousness. But when the nearly last frames are slowed down to 2 frames per second, a frightening image emerges behind Obama, an explosive blast not at all random:

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Once again, the McCain campaign  implies that Obama will plunge the country into violence and anarchy, a theme developed in the earlier ads linking Obama with former Weather Underground member William Ayers.

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A few other interesting frames:

Are these horns on Obama’s head, or random scratches?

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And does this vampirish distortion of Obama result from chance artifacts?

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Whether the McCain Campaign has deliberately manipulated these frames in this form or not, it continues to present an image of Barack Obama that robs the candidate of his familiarity and humanity.

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The following subliminal technique, however, can’t be anything but deliberate:

The ad, in seeking to connect ACORN with subprime loans and hence the recent economic crisis, collages hundred dollar bills with words torn from headlines about the crisis. But it adds, for just a frame or two, a word that was not likely part of any newspaper headline: “unhappy.” The ad uses a technique called “semantic priming” to create an emotional response in the viewer (see, for example,
Semantic Priming : Perspectives from Memory and Word Recognition).

Given the manipulations and distortions in other McCain Campaign ads, it’s unlikely that all of the subliminal techniques in the “Acorn” are completely accidental.