John Kasich’s PAC is following his positivity lead, and will roll out a TV spot statewide Wednesday in South Carolina focused on national security in the hopes of swaying Republican voters heading to the polls Saturday.

Fred Davis, media strategist for New Day for America, the PAC established to back Gov. Kasich, said a recent spot intended to contrast the Ohio governor with his attack-happy opponents has been well received according to polling. The “Muddier” spot paints Gov. Kasich as the lone voice against mudslinging in the GOP presidential race, and is still running since launching February 4 — despite the fact it references New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who has since ceased his campaign. Not the typical campaign ad, “Muddier” pictures in black-and-white a rotund fellow and a man-child sipping water furiously from a bottle — stand-ins for Gov. Christie and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. The two bookend a group of five men, all caked head to toe in mud.

“As John Kasich has risen, Rubio and Bush have gone negative,” declares a voice-over. “Doing whatever it takes to win is not presidential.”

The positive — if anti-negative — message is a signal for things to come from New Day, which has backed Gov. Kasich with millions of dollars worth of television and digital ads thus far. In South Carolina alone, New Day has dropped $276,000 on television ads since February 9, according to Kantar Media’s CMAG data. Federal Election Commission data shows the group has spent $48,000 on digital ads in the state with Arena Online.

Although the PAC also has been running the same ad it did in New Hampshire to introduce Kasich to voters, Mr. Davis and his team have developed specific TV creative for South Carolina that will begin running on television statewide Wednesday night. The New Day ads won’t attack candidates vying for top spots in the South Carolina Republican primary, to be held February 20, despite the state’s reputation for mudslinging.

“That’s what [Gov. Kasich is] really like and so there won’t be from us anything negative in South Carolina,” said Mr. Davis.

“There’s a history of really dirty politics in South Carolina, which seems odd to me because it’s such an elegant and serene state,” he continued. The man behind some of the most memorable Republican ads and web videos of the last few election cycles, he worked with former 2016 hopeful Carly Fiorina during her failed 2010 run for Senate. That campaign brought voters the now-iconic spot created by Mr. Davis, “Demon Sheep.”

The New Day PAC has already been burnt by negative messaging. When the group earlier this month released an ad attacking Sen. Rubio for voting against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, the PAC had to pull the spot. “Within seconds the campaign had denounced it and Kasich denounced it and so we won’t be going down that path again,” said Mr. Davis.

The PAC does not expect Gov. Kasich — who has stated he expects to do especially well once the primary calendar shifts to the Midwest — to win in South Carolina. “We’re in South Carolina to advance the ball, but certainly we do not expect to come out on top there,” said Mr. Davis.

Gov. Kasich came in second place in the New Hampshire primary with around 16% of the vote, behind Donald Trump. The Governor’s strong showing has spurred interest among donors, especially those who had supported Gov. Christie and Ms. Fiorina before they called it quits. According to Mr. Davis, New Day has received an influx of inquiries from interested donors who have considered giving to Gov. Kasich or the New Day PAC. “All I know is that this has been a very good week,” he told Ad Age on Friday.

Read the original story at Advertising Age.

WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) — Sen. John McCain’s campaign has quietly tapped two veteran GOP advertising executives to bulk up the team for the fall fight, one of whom is Fred Davis, who had left last year during darker times for Team McCain.

Mr. Davis, of Strategic Perception, Los Angeles, and Chris Mottola, a Philadelphia consultant, have joined Mike Hudome on the Foxhole Productions media team now headed by Mark McKinnon, vice chairman of WPP Group’s Public Strategies in Austin, Texas.

Mr. McKinnon has said in an interview with Texas Monthly last year that he would step down if Sen. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination because he was unwilling to engage in the kind of attack advertising that would be needed against Mr. Obama during a presidential campaign.

He said this week he still supports Mr. McCain, but would become mainly a “cheerleader” if Mr. Obama won.

“If it’s Hillary, I stay and blitz every play,” he said.

Messrs. Davis and Mottola worked on the Bush Maverick Media ad team that was also headed by Mr. McKinnon, but the two are better known for work they each did in senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial campaigns for Republican candidates.

Mr. Mottola produced ads for Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., Arlen Specter, R-Pa. and New York Gov. George Pataki. The Specter race included a hard-fought 2004 primary challenge against conservative Pat Toomey. Mr. Mottola also was part of Rudy Giuliani’s media team last year.

Mr. Davis often uses a slightly less serious approach to political advertising and was enlisted by Republicans to successfully right Bob Corker’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee in a widely watched race in which Mr. Corker faced then U.S. Rep. Harold Ford. He also handled the campaigns of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. He currently handles the cable industry’s National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

Mr. Davis is making a return engagement to the McCain campaign. He was one of the campaign’s original ad consultants in early 2007, before the campaign started running low on funds and was forced to make major staffing cutbacks.

With no funds to pay ad consultants, Mr. McKinnon was subsequently pressed into service as the campaign’s main ad strategist, working without pay.

Mr. Hudome, the head of MH Media, Alexandria, Va., and former executive director of the Delaware Republican Party, is a veteran GOP advertising executive who handled numerous GOP campaigns when he was with Pintak Gautier Hudome Agency. MH Media has been buying media for the McCain campaign.

Foxhole also includes Justin Germany, a 28-year-old web ad expert, pressed into duty as cameraman and editor; and it has included Mark Salter, the campaign’s chief of staff and speechwriter, doing double duty as an ad copywriter.

What a concept: Dusk in America.

Twenty-two years after Ronald Reagan spun out-of-control deficits into “rebirth,” California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has contrived to run the greatest American political ad essentially in reverse, and so to cast his hapless opponent into the ominous gloaming. It’s a cruel masterpiece.

Between now and November, Schwarzenegger can get caught groping Miss Teen Fresno, the California Republican party can make Barry Bonds its chairman and President Bush can declare war on Oregon.

Arnold is still a lock.

This has nothing to do with his performance as governor, which in our opinion has been erratic at best. Nor with the qualifications of his opponent, state Treasurer Phil Angelides. It certainly has nothing to do with a Republican resurgence; the GOP has brilliantly maneuvered itself Out of its so-called permanent majority in Congress and may run third in the mid-terms to the Whigs.

No, credit here goes only to the campaign ads, which began running about five minutes after Angelides got the nomination, and which etched the contest in stone: The Democrat represents a step backward for California.

“It was a time of gray skies, punishing taxes, disappearing jobs, a state near bankruptcy,” says the gravelly-voiced narrator, over gunmetal images of life in reverse. Buildings being deconstructed. Traffic moving backward. Angelides himself dismally moonwalking in super-slow motion. “Will California move backward with politician Phil Angelides, who promises to raise taxes on California families by $10 billion, or keep moving forward protecting the California dream for you and your family? That’s our choice.”

Well, of course, in reality that isn’t the choice. The text is really just boilerplate rhetoric, ignoring the state’s ongoing fiscal and political crises and trotting out the threadbare pieties of the GOP. But that hardly matters because, for one thing, claims that Schwarzenegger has moved California forward are plainly subjective and therefore not demonstrably false.

But more than that, the text is scarcely important. What counts here is the imagery — the indelible imagery — of retreat. The political consultancy Strategic Perception, Hollywood, has taken the stirring optimism of Reagan’s “Morning in America” and found its reciprocal: a grim and pessimistic vision of an Angelides governorship. Talk about gloom and doom. In this quintessential example of campaign noir, sunny Californians are deprived not only of prosperity and progress, but of the sun itself.

It’s bleak. It’s simple. It’s devastating.

Like the “flip-flop” charge that destroyed Stuttering John Kerry, “backward” has defined Angelides from the start and will do so till the finish. Worse yet for the challenger, Schwarzenegger’s 5-1 cash advantage will enable himto drum the definition into the head of every voter many times over.

There is always, of course, the possibility that voters will resist such blunt, disingenuous tactics and carefully examine the campaign’s assertions against the available facts. Perhaps they will parse the “$10 billion tax on families” rhetoric and see that the tax is intended for those earning more than $250,000. Perhaps they will question what, exactly, in Schwarzenegger’s term of office has propelled the state forward. And perhaps the 49ers will go to the Super Bowl.

Except that they won’t.

No, this race is over. For the Democrats, it can only now serve as fair warning for what is to follow in the presidential race in two years’ time. Whoever wins the nomination had better be prepared to face instant branding from the competition. Bush could indeed invade Oregon. But what’s that against, for example:

Hillary=bitch.

~ ~ ~

Review 3.5 stars
Ad: Skies
Agency: Strategic Perception
Location: Hollywood, Calif.