TV Ad Destroys the Reelection of this Bet

 

By Mortz C. Ortigoza

After I discovered that some of my hard covered books’ collection ensconced on my book shelves in my room had been inhabited and gnawed by termites, I immediately asked my errand boy Galman Torres to retrieve them, clean their growing colony, and spray the area with antidote.

Among those books damaged and consumed by fire were Bob Woodward’s VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA, The Choice, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House, and State of Denial. The other the 957 pages’ My Life: Bill Clinton - a best seller autobiography published by Knopf Publishing Group in 2004 - which I have not read since my younger brother in California bought it for me almost two decades ago had been salvaged. I read a chapter or two of it every time I wake up in the morning while sipping my coffee.

There is a page of this hardback that I could juxtapose with the election law in the Philippines and the fateful event there could probably  be used or  avoided by the Pinoy's politicians.

Before citing the excerpt of that page,  allow me to expand what campaign and election propaganda in the  Omnibus Election Code.  Section 79 describes "election campaign" or "partisan political activity" as an act designed to promote the election or defeat of a particular candidate or candidates to a public office which shall include (paragraph b); Publishing or distributing campaign literature or materials designed to support or oppose the election of any candidate (subparagraph 4).

Photo Credit: Television Academy

Let's go now to the visceral: On Page 297 of My Life where governorship challenger Jim Guy Tucker (no relation to Jim Croce's folk rock Speed Tucker) of Arkansas Governor Clinton (elected later as the 42^nd President of the United States) used scathing television paid advertisement to pounce on him that he lost his reelection.

Here’s an excerpt of that event where Filipinos running for the national and local positions can use and exploit at the expense of their opponents:

“My campaign would have collapsed in the first month if I hadn’t learned the lessons of 1980 about the impact of the negative television ads. Right off the bat, Jim Guy Tucker put up an ad criticizing me for commuting the sentences of first degree murderers in my first term. He highlighted the case of a man who got out and killed a friend just a few weeks after his release. Since the voters hadn’t been aware of that issue my apology ad didn’t immunize me from it, and I dropped behind Tucker in the polls”.

Clinton said on his autobiography that the Board of Pardons and Paroles of Arkansas had recommended the commutations in question for two reasons:

First, the board and the people running the prison system felt it would be much harder to maintain order and minimize violence if the “lifters” knew they could never get out no matter how well they behaved; Second, a lot of the older inmates had extensive health problems that cost the state a lot of money. If they were released, their health cost would be covered by the Medicaid program, which was funded mostly by the federal government.

Clinton, who survived a presidential impeachment because of the sexual MonicaGate, recalled: “The case featured in the ad was truly bizarre. The man whom I made eligible for parole was seventy-two years old and had served more than sixteen years for murder. In all that time, he had been a model prisoner with only one disciplinary mark against him. He was suffering from arteriosclerosis, and the prison doctors said he had about a year to live and probably would be completely incapacitated within six months, costing the prison budget a small fortune. He also had a sister in southeast Arkansas who was willing to take him in”.

He continued that about six weeks after the parolee was out of the slammer, he was drinking beer with a friend in the other man’s pickup truck, with a gun rack in the back. He and his booze buddy got into a fight and the ex-convict grabbed the gun, shot the man dead, and took his Social Security's check. “Between the time of his arrest and his trail for that offense (shooting with a gun his beer buddy), the judge released the helpless-looking old man into his sister’s custody. A few days after that he got on the back of the motorcycle, driving by a thirty-year - old man and rode north, all the way up to Pottsville, a little known town near Russellville, where they tried to rob the local bank by driving the motorcycle right through the front door. The old boy was sick all right, but not in the way the prison doctors thought”.

Geez, in the Philippines our legal minds called this criminal as recidivist - the lowlife of the society who does not deserve mercy.

The future President – who said in that book how he loves politics and the crowd – said after that incident by the ex-convict-  he was in Pine Bluff in the country clerk’s office.

“I shook hands with a woman who told me the man who’d been killed in his pickup was her uncle. She was kind enough to say, “I don’t hold you responsible. There’s no way in the wide world you could have known he’d do that.”

 Most voters, Clinton averred, weren’t as forgiving. He said when he defeated Governor Tucker in their rematch, he promised not to commute the sentences of any more first-degree murderers and said he would require greater participation by victims of the crimes in the decisions of the Board of Pardons and Paroles.

***

Look how the odium and opprobrium of TV campaign brought to the highest office in 2013 Israel Prime Minister Bibi (not Gandang Hari) Netanyahu (the younger brother of a hero Colonel Yoni Netanyahu who was killed at the Operation Entebe in Uganda) of Israel.

To quote what former U.S President Clinton wrote on his book's My Life:

” On May 29 (1996), I stayed up until well past midnight watching the election returns in Israel. It was a real cliffhanger, as Bibi Netanyahu defeated Shimon Peres by less than one percent of the vote. Peres won the Arab vote by a large majority, but Netanyahu beat him badly enough among Jewish voters, who made up more than 90 percent of the electorate, to win. He did it by promising to be tougher on terrorism and slower with the peace process, and by using American-style television ads, including some attacking Peres that were made with the help of a Republican media advisor from New York. Peres resisted the pleas of his supporters to answer the ads until the very end of the campaign, and by then it was too late. I thought Shimon had done a good job as prime minister, and he had given his entire life to the state of Israel, but in 1996, by a narrow margin, Netanyahu proved to be a better politician”.

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MORTZ C. ORTIGOZA

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I am a twenty years seasoned Op-Ed Political Writer in various newspapers and Blogger exposing government corruptions, public officials's idiocy and hypocrisies, and analyzing local and international issues. I have a master’s degree in Public Administration and professional government eligibility. I taught for a decade Political Science and Economics in universities in Metro Manila and cities of Urdaneta, Pangasinan and Dagupan. Follow me on Twitter @totoMortz or email me at totomortz@yahoo.com.