I go crazy for the Olympics. Most of my close friends and family members know that if they need to reach me over the next three weeks, they’ll find me glued to a television. I’m a complete sucker for all of the pomp and pageantry surrounding the Games, and I will admit that the Opening Ceremony blew me away despite my best efforts to treat China’s display with the scrutiny it deserves.
But the Summer Games aren’t the only major sensation that comes about every four years. There’s an election on, if you haven’t heard, and the candidates are especially eager to target all of those patriotic viewers watching Michael Phelps et al bring home the gold.
A few weeks before the Olympics began, I came across this post (emphasis mine):
Conventional wisdom has held that neither candidate would pick his running mate during the Olympic Games, because once underway the Games would occupy the nation’s attention at the expense of political news. [...]
The vice presidential pick is big political news, but consider what the Obama campaign’s ideal scenario is: dozens and dozens of ads aimed at a national audience permitting the Democrats to define and frame the ticket on their own terms. Biographical spots, smiling running mates, optimistic, patriotic, flag-waving images, and no countering ads from the Republicans that define the ticket in negative terms. It’s a mass first impression of an optimistic, change ticket Obama would want to make, and almost a free field to make that impression (there are no reports of any McCain Olympic ad buy, and negative ads during the Olympics feel tonally off).
Of course, part of this scenario changed dramatically when McCain’s campaign upped the ante with $6 million (compared to Obama’s $5 million) in Olympics advertising. But going into the Olympics I was convinced that this strategy could work and that no candidate would dare interrupt the free-flowing goodwill of the Olympics with attack ads.
Wrong.
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