Wednesday, September 17, 2003

In The Village Voice, Rick Perlstein fantasizes about ads the Democrats could -- should -- run in 2004. Here's one:

I picture zeros filling the screen. George W. Bush's zeros. There are 11 zeros in $500 billion—the current estimate of Bush's budget deficit. There is one more zero in a trillion—the amount the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the Bush tax cuts for the rather well-off will end up costing. Maybe start off the commercial with six zeros almost filling the screen: the six zeros in 3 million, the number of jobs lost under Bush. Picture them as balloons: six of them, filling with air, crowding the frame. Five more balloons, then six, crowd them further, the narrator explaining how many zeros there are in $1,000,000,000,000. The balloons get too big, the screen is too small, a single TV set proves unable to squeeze them all in. The balloons begin to explode, one by one, until there's only one fat, round one left. Which begins to whinily leak.

A single zero. To illustrate the number of net jobs created under every administration led by a man with the last name of Bush.


His other ads are pretty good, too.

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