As the Spring 2012 provincial election approaches, the Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose Party have rolled out a series of television ads (on YouTube) delivering their political pitches to Albertans.
The Wildrose ads, as David Climenhaga and Graham Thomson have already written, are cast with two faces of leader Danielle Smith.
To quote Mr. Climenhaga, ‘Bad Danielle is going to slap you around a bit now for even thinking about voting for Alberta Premier Alison Redford… while she’s gone, Good Danielle may offer you a cup of coffee, apologize for her partner’s behaviour and try to sweet-talk you out of your troubles…”.
The first Wildrose ad, ‘Flip Flop’, takes a negative angle and could be confused with the Conservative Party ads from the last federal election. Accentuating the negative, these types of ads were deadly for federal Liberal leaders Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.
The second Wildrose ad features leader Ms. Smith speaking about education, which I believe may be the best of the ads released by any party so far. Ms. Smith is clear, confident, and shockingly warm for a conservative politician (though I still would not trust the former Calgary School Trustee to run our education system).
The first of the two Progressive Conservative ads introduces Premier Redford and the second ad features the Premier talking about the promise of education. They are rather plain and fuzzy feeling, which is surprising considering Premier Redford’s interesting background (including her surprisingly extensive international experience).
The theme of the PC ads appears to be ‘look how good your quality of life is,’ which appears to be a reaction to the negative tone of Wildrose ads. Although they cry for excitement, these dull and numbing ads should not hurt the PCs so long as they do not linger too far into the Harry Strom-like “don’t even think about doing anything drastic like voting for another party’ because ‘we’ve renewed… really… we have… a new leader… look at our exciting new leader!’ territory.
3 replies on “pre-election games: progressive conservatives and wildrose spar with new ads.”
The phrase that comes to mind: “Same sh*t, different pile.”
Did the “making smart choices” PC tagline remind anyone else of this?
Think Ms. Redford forgot a line in the Education Ad.
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“… but if Albertans want to drop out of high school and go work the oil patch … we’re good with that too.”
D’oh!