Don't miss Mitt Romney's new ad for Hillary Clinton.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Pan to the Ocean: With the sound off, Mitt Romney's new TV spot "Ocean" could be about climate change, The Perfect Storm, or the Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina. When David Brody of the Christian Bible Network watched it, he forgot which cable channel he works for: "There are so many shots of the ocean in it, I was waiting for the crew of Baywatch to save someone." More than anything, the spot reminded me of the opening credits of the camp '60s soap Dark Shadows.

Fortunately, Romney's voiceover clears up any confusion: It's an ad for Rosie O'Donnell and Hillary Clinton.

The text of the ad comes from a speech Romney gave at a Reagan gala in April, shortly after the Virginia Tech shootings. Romney cites a Wall Street Journal op-ed Peggy Noonan wrote after the Columbine shootings in 1999, which offered an extended metaphor about our polluted modern culture as "the ocean in which our children swim." "Your child is an intelligent little fish," Noonan wrote—four years before Finding Nemo—but the Columbine shooters "inhaled too deeply in the oceans in which they swam."

Republican candidates don't normally make ads about children emerging from the sea with gills. But Romney, to his credit, says he believes in evolution—so much so that his positions are evolving every day.

Noonan's post-diluvian vision offers one horror after another: "The dark genie is out of the bottle and swims in the seas." Romney and his ad makers drag her metaphor to new depths. He says he'd like to "clean up the water in which our kids are swimming"—by keeping pornography off their computers, drugs off the streets, and sex and violence out of television and video games.

It's safe to assume Mitt Romney didn't inhale. But before they made "Ocean," the Romney team should have taken a closer look at the speech and op-ed on which it's based.

Oddly enough, the speech starts out with a different aquatic metaphor. At the same time as the Virginia Tech shooting, the entire Romney clan was gathered at the family lake house in New Hampshire, looking out the window at "a grey day with record rainfall." Romney doesn't mention which ad they were filming. Perhaps "Ocean" will have a fresh-water sequel called "Loons."

In the speech, Romney asks, "What are we to make of what happened at Virginia Tech?" In three short paragraphs, his answer goes from Cain and Abel to Hitler and Ahmadinejad to Bill Clinton reducing the size of the military after the Cold War.

Near the end of the speech, Romney rolls out the Noonan riff, followed by yet another water story from his childhood. This time, he and a friend were about to inhale too deeply in the 4-foot waves of Lake Huron, when his friend's mother waded out in her dress, grabbed them by the arm, and dragged them both to shore. Romney's conclusion: "The most important work being done to strengthen America's future is the work that is being done within the 4 walls of the American home." Or vacation home, as the case may be.