BTW, I love the references to McCarthy.  These guys are every bit as bad as he was and now there are a lot more of them.

Thanks for posting this!

Sweeney's campaign consists of nothing more than bullying, smearing and sliming. He and his spokeswoman and surrogate attack dogs are attacking Kirsten Gillilbrand personally. They are attacking her profession, her husband, his profession, his past jobs, her father, her brother, her grandmother, her uncle, her residency, and her sex.

They cannot and do not campaign on the issues. Their campaign consists of nothing but bullying.

We can only imagine that they'll attack her Aunt Pam next.

The Ad seems creative, but I didn't much care for Good Night and Good Luck.  It was sold as an account of a great act of courage, but there wasn't much that was heroic about the story.  I just didn't get it.

Thanks for bumping this up Jonathan.

Sweeney has gone strongly negative evoking images of McCarthyism in his smearing of good decent people. I know the Gillibrand's. Kirsten and Jonathan are good decent people that I'm happy to have as neighbors and friends let alone as my future Representative to Congress.

John Sweeney has built a career in dirty politics and this challenge is bringing out the worst in him and his surrogates. He learned at the feet of Al D'Amato and Bill Powers and then moved on to having Tom DeLay and Karl Rove as his mentors.

He has no decency and has no business being in public service.

This was my first ever diary on MyDD (I usually hang out at DailyKos).  Needless to say, I'm amazed it got bumped.  Thank you very much!

Let the competition begin for the second best ad of the cycle.

First off, I love the innovation - anything to get away from those boreathon boilerplate spots spraying bullet points with a badly spoken kicker from the candidate.

And the black-and-white lighting is excellent.

And have the movie Murrow of the moment actually working for the campaign - well, I can understand KG's people going with the idea.

But - the inarticulate (or not-so-inarticulate) premise is Sweeney = McCarthy - which is utterly ridiculous.

That wouldn't matter so much over a thirty second spot - but, at 2:12, it just got old.

Plus - I've not been following (and thus wouldn't dream of commenting on) the campaign; but I'd wonder straight off how serious the smearing of KG's family has been and how close to Sweeney have the smears been tracked down to.

(Because the general opinion of voters, so far as I'm aware from the polling I've seen, is that they're all the same more or less, and complaining about a little rough stuff, especially by a woman, would come off as feeble.)

The language used is pretty much on the hyperbolic side - candidate he's trying to destroy - and personal attacks that should have been for ever relegated to the long-condemned past (does he mean 2004?) - which would tend to put off the uncommitteed, and I'd guess that, while the choir will be ecstatic, the said uncommitted may well get bored long before the end.

(Of course, attention spans have vastly shortened since Murrow did his thing on See It Now.)

Takeaway: thank Goodness, we have a campaign that's experimenting.

Great ad, I like the fact that it gets right in Sweeney's face.   Exactly the right tactic when dealing with a bully.

Dear Jesus, this is the kind of thing where, if you saw a Republican ad to the same effect, you'd call it corny, pandering and stupid. Because it is.

I'm such a sap, it made me cry.

First off, it only makes sense to those of us who have seen GN&GL... Second, this is a guy doing a Murrow impression, going after Sweeney, which tacitly says Sweeney=Mccarthy, and frankly, you may as well call him a Nazi, because that is way over the top. Last, it struck me as insincere, because his eyes were always looking off camera. It gets a thumbs down from this blogger.

Last, it struck me as insincere, because his eyes were always looking off camera.

I assume this was to mimic what news readers did at the time, in pre-telepromopter days, which was to read a piece of paper with copy on it, so that makes it authentic -- but, unfortunately, in this day and age, it does read as shifty, and it's also distracting to boot.  (I wanted to know what he was looking at, since he spent so much time doing it.)

As I said in the other thread about the ad, I think it stinks.  The visual style is nice, but the concept strikes me as esoteric, and the writing very poor.  It has very emotional punch, no factual content to speak of, and appeals only to those who already know pretty much everything that's in it -- i.e. it preaches to the choir.

If that was their intention, fine, if they wanted to get some buzz going so they can tap that old liberal blogosphere cash register, well fine, maybe it'll work, but if their intention was to actually get some people to vote for the candidate, then they've done a terrible job.