Demon Politicians

     Demon Sheep & Demon Blimp. The way Carly Fiorina had decided to depict her primary rivals, Tom Campbell and Barbara Boxer. In 2010 when Carly Fiorina decided to run for US Senate from California, her campaign team put out attack ads on Tom Campbell and multiple on Barbara Boxer addressing, national security, fiscal irresponsibility, and ineffectiveness in office.

     For the issue of fiscal irresponsibility, Tom Campbell’s ongoing spending and borrowing that ruined the states budget in 2005 was Carly’s attacking point. Tom supported the budget for a $16 billion new tax increase for California and Carly was trying to expose him for it. Tax on gas was already so high, she began to highlight that Tom was the only candidate who failed to sign the “no tax increase” pledge, intending on watching gas prices increase. Carly then described her opponent as FCINO (fiscal conservative in name only) being a “wolf in sheep’s’ clothing.” 

     During her attack ads on Barbara Boxer, Carly point out the many inefficiencies in Barbara’s past political experiences. She believe that Barbara’s cocky self image made her word no longer credible. She again touched on the issue of raising taxes and increasing gas prices, both which Barbara said she would prevent and in turn raised them.

     These ad’s produced by Carly’s campaign team provide comic relief to seriously issues that were happening in California at the time. These ads have no evidence of gender strategies but flourishes on the challenger strategy. These ads were clearly made to defer votes from Boxer and Campbell to Carly. The media had a field day with these attack ad’s saying that it was “a straight-up game-changing shock-and-awe slice of pure mountain grown BONKERS” (Huffington Post). Since Carly had not put out anything like this before the public was very surprised by the level of “awe” these ad's created.