I have investigated the situation, and I believe I have found the man responsible for Carly Fiorina’s strange sheep ad and Steve Poizner’s bizarre demand for federal law enforcement investigation of his rival Meg Whitman’s attempts to get him to abandon the race.
The man responsible for this madness is, I am sad to report, me.
Well, not just me, but me and people like me. Journalists with short attention spans, who are bored by most of what goes on in the U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races, and have trouble finding editors who want to hear about the relatively routine policy and political debates in both contests. As a result, we rarely write about what’s happening in these races.
That leaves candidates desperate for media attention. And so, quite rationally, they realize that the only way to rouse me from my slumber is to do something a bit bizarre.
That’s why Fiorina, in an attempt to get my attention, doesn’t merely call Tom Campbell a RINO and a phony as a fiscal conservative (she’d done that in multiple press releases, all of which I ignored). She also releases a web ad that seems to suggest he’s some kind of demon sheep on a pedestal. And it worked. She got my attention, and, like… well, a sheep, I am writing about that ad right now.
I hadn’t thought about Poizner in weeks — before he called his press conference and announced he was referring a complaint about Whitman consultant Mike Murphy to every law enforcement agency short of Interpol. Yes, this seemed a bit crazy. But if he had just released Murphy’s emails and talked soberly about how Whitman was trying to get him out of the race, I doubt that my journalistic colleagues and I would have spilled so much ink on the matter. He had to walk on the crazy side to get our attention.
There’s a cost to this approach. Poizner and Fiorina have come under widespread criticism for their tactics. But each candidate seems willing to suffer such criticism in return for the payoff of free media attention. In this environment, these candidates’ gambits count as successes. Which is why we should expect to see these Poizner, Fiorina and their rivals up the ante on bizarre before too long.