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Friday, February 20, 2009

Conservative group uses Jesus in anti-stimulus ad

Politico has a video of an ad put out by a third party conservative group in opposition to the stimulus. The storyline of the ad involves Jesus Christ. (I can't find a way to embed this so please click on the link to watch it.)

To me this is an extraordinarily clever idea by the conservatives who created it because not only do they manage to portray Obama's stimulus bill as wasteful and ineffective, they subtly equate their party as the party on the side of God -- a platform that has worked very well for them for many decades.

Although the ad doesn't make explicit statements or judgments about the pro-stimulus legislators, it does create a moral force-field between liberals/Democrats and conservatives/Republicans, where it conditions the viewer to think that Jesus would oppose the bill, and as a result be on the side of the latter. Without overanalyzing the ad, I think it does manage to reinforce the Christian values that the Republican Party has associates themselves with, and invokes those as part of the reason for their opposition to the stimulus.

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