An emotional appeal

It contends to be the most cleverly effective political commercial of the year.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

It endeavors at once to:

• Advance a warm and endearing personal narrative, which is the foundation of most successful Arkansas campaigns for high office.

• Appeal to vital senior citizens and women, who vote in relatively high numbers and generally are more receptive to touching personal narratives than are grouchy non-senior men.

• Deflect an otherwise lethal association with Obamacare, which appears in this commercial as the health-care law with no name.


It is a Mark Pryor television spot.

Democrats across the country are looking to see if it shows them how to turn back the tide of enmity toward Obamacare. And it might do that, if, that is, any other candidate has survived a rare, life-threatening cancer and has a daddy who is a widely beloved political legend.

In this spot, Pryor is seated at a table with his dad, former U.S. Sen. David. Dad's peak popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s was Mike Beebe-sized but warmer--more personal than Beebe's performance-driven public approval.

David opens the commercial by saying he thought he might lose Mark to cancer that time. He says the insurance company didn't want to pay all the bills.

Mark gives his daddy a loving nudge and says his faith and family pulled him through.

Mark says no one should have to fight insurance companies while fighting for his life.

And that's why, Mark says, he voted for that law requiring that insurance companies couldn't cancel policies or deny coverage to persons with pre-existing conditions.

That law was Obamacare.

To try to make the costly coverage for pre-existing conditions work for insurance companies, the law did a couple of thousand pages of other things.

It's been 17 years since I wrote a 3,000-word article for the Style section of this paper about Mark Pryor's cancer. Last week the Pryor campaign was emailing that article across the country to media people wanting to know the personal story invoked in this commercial.

In his early 30s, Mark played basketball semi-regularly at the Little Rock YMCA. One day he noticed a bump in the area of his Achilles tendon.

He thought it was an injury, as did his orthopedic surgeon. The surgeon removed the lingering knot and, as a matter of course, had it sent for biopsy.

Lo and behold, it was a clear-cell sarcoma with a nearly 50 percent mortality rate.

A 13-hour series of surgical procedures, including replacing that tendon with an abdominal tendon, forced Pryor to learn to walk again. And it saved his life to run again--for attorney general and then the U.S. Senate.

So it would be instructive in understanding the aspiring brilliance of this commercial to examine recent credible polling of Pryor's epic race against Republican Tom Cotton.

First, polls showed a profound gender gap in which Cotton's advantage among lighter-voting men was larger than Pryor's advantage among women.

What Pryor needed in order to pad his advantage with women, the experts said, was a stronger human connection. That meant something--a story, ideally--highlighting Pryor's likable nature as compared to the seeming harshness of some of Cotton's votes--against disaster aid, student loans and the Arkansas Children's Hospital.

Second, polls showed that the traditional advantage for Pryor and Democrats among seniors had vanished. Apparently it was lost to prevailing fear about what Obamacare might mean to Medicare, which, in reality, is little to nothing.

What Pryor needed, the experts said, was to bring Dad out to remind older voters of their affection for him. And Mark needed somehow to allay senior fears of Obamacare.

So this commercial deftly seeks to meet all of Pryor's messaging needs inside a minute. It is a would-be magic elixir.

If it plays as well as I think it will, Pryor will gain a precious point or two.

In part, that's because the ad presents Cotton with a difficult counter-punch.

The best the Cotton campaign could do last week was say it was glad Mark survived his illness, but that Obamacare was still terrible, and that, by the way, about immigration ...

I suspect, though, that the Koch brothers are busy scouring the country for a cancer victim whose premiums rose because of Obamacare.

"I'm so thankful Senator Pryor survived his cancer scare. I know how much his dad loves him. I just wish Senator Pryor hadn't cast the tie-breaking vote for Obamacare to make it more expensive for me to try to survive mine."

How would that work as a script?

Ponder it in case the Kochs find somebody to say it or something like it.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 08/24/2014

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