If you’re a talented video producer with a tendency toward scathing, sarcastic attacks, this appears to be your year.
The 2012 presidential campaign has become a battlefield of mocking, rhetorical missiles, many of them delivered in the form of cheap, quickly produced videos posted to the Internet and publicized by the campaigns on Twitter and Facebook.
But do they go too far, risking a backlash even as they go viral?
President Obama’s campaign and his Democratic allies are testing that thesis with a series of videos and TV ads that have made fun of Mitt Romney’s off-key singing, his awkward lapses into corporate-speak and even his wife’s beloved dancing Olympic horse.
That last one has already blown up in their faces.
In two videos produced by the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Romney’s words were juxtaposed with images of Ann Romney’s horse, Rafalca, performing the Olympic sport of dressage, or horse ballet, with a top-hatted man in the saddle.
“Do we really want a president who dances around the issues?” asks the video — which has been viewed 61,440 times.
Mr. Obama’s supporters clearly thought the video was funny. Mrs. Romney apparently thought otherwise. And it turns out that mocking the very serious hobby of a candidate’s wife — especially one who is extremely popular — is not a particularly good strategy.
The Democratic National Committee quickly apologized, saying that the “use of the Romneys’ dressage horse was not meant to offend Mrs. Romney in any way, and we regret it if it did.”
Perhaps the committee should have listened to Mr. Obama’s own advice, delivered earlier this year after a Democratic strategist criticized Mrs. Romney as never having worked a day in her life. In a television interview soon after, Mr. Obama suggested staying away from spouses.
“I haven’t met Mrs. Romney, but she seems like a very nice woman who is supportive of her family and supportive of her husband. I don’t know if she necessarily volunteered for this job so, you know, we don’t need to be directing comments at them,” he said.
But if Democrats are backing away from the horse images, they are by no means abandoning the posting of biting videos to drive home their message.
In a video released by Mr. Obama this week, a handful of people can be seen reading a transcript of Mr. Romney’s answer to questions about when he left Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded two decades ago. The voters trip over his awkward phrasing, making the video seem more like a segment on “The Daily Show” than a campaign ad.
“He says ‘entity’ a lot,” one person says, looking a bit confused.
Mr. Obama’s campaign also produced a television ad shown in nine battleground states that shows Mr. Romney singing “America the Beautiful” — badly. The idea was to contrast the song with images of the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, where Mr. Romney reportedly kept money in offshore accounts.
Senior advisers to Mr. Obama said they believed the ad did not go too far. They said they were confident that voters would see it as a lighthearted way to make a point about Mr. Romney’s finances.
The Romney campaign disagreed, and quickly issued a statement accusing Mr. Obama of making fun of a great American song. “It is sad and shameful that President Obama would mock ‘America The Beautiful,’” the statement said.
The use of sarcastic videos is not limited to Mr. Obama’s campaign. Mr. Romney and his Republican allies have produced their fair share of attacks intended to become sensations on the Internet.
One recent video by the Republican National Committee shows Jay Carney, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, saying that the president has “a lot on his plate.” The video then goes on to show that Mr. Obama has golfed 10 times and held 106 fund-raisers in the last six months, while his jobs council has not met once.
The video then shows a fancy-looking dinner plate with $100 bills and golf balls on it.
In another golf-themed video (lest people forget that Mr. Obama plays a lot of golf), the Republican National Committee shows a golfer repeatedly missing the final put, while showing headlines about Mr. Obama’s economic policies.
This is not the first election to feature snarky videos. In 1988, video of Michael Dukakis wearing a helmet as he rode in a tank came to epitomize his awkwardness. And in 2004, an ad of John Kerry windsurfing was used by Republicans as a metaphor for his flip-flopping.
But it does seem as if a cadre of Democratic and Republican video producers have been busy for months creating a mountain of these attack videos, just waiting for the moment to unload them on the voters.
That moment seems to be now.
