[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7HiQRM7BA[/youtube]I’m at an academic conference at Stanford Law School this weekend and have had my attention drawn to the latest internet sensation: The “Demon Sheep” Video. The video was produced for Carly Fiorina’s Republican Senate campaign. It is a 3 and 1/2 minute “attack ad” against Tom Campbell, a respected former Stanford law professor and congressman.
To dramatize its claim that Campbell is a big-spending wolf in fiscal-conservative sheep’s clothing, the video contains, well, a demon sheep — a sheep with glowing red devilish eyes.
The ad apparently has more than 375,000 views is something of an eye-opener, leading Mary Ham to write at the Weekly Standard: “Someday, when your children are grown and the election of 2010 has long past, people will ask where you were when the demon sheep first came to American politics.” (Read the whole thing here.)
The ad is being widely lampooned across the internet (example here). To mock the ad, another opponent of Fiorina in the Republic primary (Chck DeVore) has website that is the “home” of SFTEODSFOPD, or Society for the Eradication of Demon Sheep from our Political Discourse.
The ad seems a bit over the top to me. While the ad’s defenders say it is attracting lots of attention to the Fiorina campaign, the kind of buzz it is attracting will test the old saw that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I close with [insert your favorite sheep pun here …]
Update: A reader suggests I should have closed with any of the following:
1. The ad’s creator should take it on the lamb.
2. Ewe can fool all the voters some of the time, and some of the voters all of the time, but ewe. . . .
3. Fame is fleecing.
4. Baaaa humbug.
5. Where there’s a wool there’s a way.
6. I must be a mutton for punishment.
7. Cogito ergo ram. (I think; therefore, I ram.)