From the Back to the Front
It’s time for the folks traditionally relegated to the background of Democratic political ads to step up and tell their own stories.
Like everyone else, I was blindsided by Randy Bryce’s campaign announcement video. And like everyone else, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and rewatching it and figuring out exactly why I had such a visceral response to the ad—why it makes me want to stand up and cheer every time I watch it.
Here, watch it again:
It’s a video that works on multiple levels. For one thing, the Wisconsin Democrat came out swinging—hard—against House Majority Leader Paul Ryan, who is one of the three most repulsive politicians in America right now. Ryan’s smug smile in the first few frames of the ad as he celebrates the passage of the horrible Republican health insurance bill through the House establishes him as a hissable movie villain. It’s a marvel of economy.
And then the commercial cuts to a woman who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She explains that her medication would cost thousands of dollars without affordable health care. “I’m gonna cry,” she says early on, and the viewer is right there with her. These are the real stakes of Ryan’s work—it’s not just a political win to toss up on the scoreboard. It’s a policy that will affect millions of Americans.
That’s when her son starts to tell his story. Randy Bryce explains that he’s “been an ironworker for 20 years.” He announces that “I can see what people need,” which is such a simple, profound statement that you never hear from politicians. Bryce acknowledges the problems in the system, and he understands those problems have real world effects. He sees you.
Democrats often say that the economy is a pie, and rather than slicing the pie into thinner slices, we should grow the pie. This is a phrase that has always bugged the editor in me; you can’t grow a pie, so the image is weird and half-fulfilled. Bryce’s demand that “it’s time to make a bigger table” is so much better than all the pie-talk.
It’s the same basic and true idea—the more people you include in an economy, the stronger the economy will be and the faster the economy will grow—but it brings a warm family dinner to mind, and it suggests building a table with your own hands, putting productive work into the viewer’s mind.
The coup-de-grace is when Bryce directly addresses his Republican opponent: “Let’s trade places, Paul Ryan,” he says. “You can work the iron, and I’ll go to DC.” Immediately, the viewer imagines Paul Ryan awkwardly walking around in a hard hat and trying and failing to weld something. It’s a hilarious image that highlights the fact that Ryan is out of touch with working people.
Everyone has said it, and I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again right here: this is an excellent ad. But I’ve seen lots of excellent political ads, and they’ve never quite hit me as hard as this one. What is it about this particular ad that works so well?
Randy Bryce’s ad is successful because it explodes my expectations of what a political ad should be. The first time I watched it, I saw Bryce’s mother, and I saw Bryce sitting with her, explaining his experience. And because I’ve watched thousands and thousands of political ads in my life, I knew what to expect next: a politician—probably a blandly inoffensive white guy in a tailored suit who makes weird and uncomfortable motions with his hands—was going to walk onto the set, introduce himself, and jabber about vouchers or cutting wasteful spending or something for fifteen seconds before landing on a stale campaign slogan. I expected that because that’s just how American political ads work.
When I first watched this ad, I was confused for a moment because I wasn’t sure who the ad was about. The traditional politician—that boring, marketing-tested guy in a suit—never showed up. Instead, one of the figures traditionally relegated to the back of the political ad behind the politician—the iron worker who had to work extra-hard to pay for his mom’s insurance—stepped up and talked to us. Bryce almost feels like a transgressor in this video, like if a background character in an action movie ran into the final scene, pushed the superhero out of the way, and saved the day.
Now that I’ve seen Bryce take command of his own narrative in this way, I expect I’ll have even less patience for traditional political ads in the future. A person traditionally relegated to a smiling figure in the background has stepped into the foreground and demonstrated that he deserves the spotlight. It’s a profound narrative shift.
This is what Democrats need to do: they need to allow the background characters to come to the foreground as candidates and take over the story. That Black woman who paid her own way through night school to start her own business? The Asian-American dad who served courageously in the military and got laid off by a greedy corporation? The mom who grieves the death of her son? It’s time for them to take the mic. They need to run for office now.
Democrats can’t just use ordinary Americans as demographic props anymore, as figures to fade into soft focus as a smiling dude walks into the center of the frame. The time for overly polished ciphers is past. We need candidates with stories to tell and true missions in their heart.
Look: I know that Bryce has a hard fight ahead of him. His district has consistently voted Republican for over 20 years, and Ryan is an incredibly formidable opponent. But even if Bryce doesn’t achieve the impossible and pull out a win, he’s done something incredible with this video: he’s identified every major problem with the political messaging-advisory complex, and he’s changed the narrative. We can’t go back to Ossofs after this.
