Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, which was covered up by the administration because it happened in the run-up to the presidential election, and it certainly was a fiasco that made those in charge look awfully negligent and incompetent. Pretty much everyone knows that by now, despite the usual attempts at spin by the news. And Hillary Clinton was in charge of the State Department at the time, so I’d say the optics are bad for her on this one, especially when you consider her “3:00 am Phone Call” ad from 2008, suggesting that she’d be the most trustworthy person in case of an emergency. And seeing as how Hillary Clinton is very likely to run for president in 2016, I thought it might be fun to try to guess how Republicans might approach exploiting this issue to bash Hillary in a political attack ad. (I am not an ad guy for the Republican Party; this is simply an intellectual exercise for me out of interest in how close I will be to accurately predicting their ad strategy here.) And my guess is that the RNC ad on Benghazi will play out like this:
We see the images of the aftermath of the Benghazi consulate attack, and a bunch of edited footage from news reports about it play. Then we see Hillary Clinton in the Congressional hearing, and she’s yelling at them: “What difference, at this point, does it make?” And then the announcer says: “Hillary warned us that it mattered who was there to answer that emergency 3:00 am phone call. But when that call came, Hillary was nowhere in sight, and her leadership and accountability on Benghazi have been just as absent.” Then the picture cuts to a splash screen that says: “Hillary 2016: What difference, at this point, does it make?” as her voice is heard saying it again.
And then, after an ad like this one, I predict that RNC attack ads will show things like statistics on the economy, unemployment, the national debt, etc., under President Obama, and then they will use the same ending, with the slogan: “Hillary 2016: What difference at this point does it make?” with her voice saying that playing over it.
I wonder how close this guess will be to what they actually do.
(BTW: This is not a partisan hit on Hillary. I’m an independent, and I like Hillary about as much as I like most other politicians. But that Benghazi attack was a real fiasco, and I’d say “the optics are bad” on this one to be sure. And so I’d anticipate the RNC to exploit it.)
