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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Thursday, September 17, 2015

MADSISON AVENUE RULES!


Readers of this blog are well aware that I hold Hillary Clinton in low esteem, but fairness requires me to acknowledge true political brilliance when I see it.  Yesterday I watched a Clinton commercial -- one  of the first I have caught on the tube, though I imagine by now there have been many.  I say without hesitation that it was the single most powerful and effective political advertisement I have ever encountered.  It was so good that after I had watched it for a while, unbidden there rose in me a visceral longing for a Clinton victory in 2016.

The commercial was lavishly produced and must have cost a small fortune, paid for out of the Clinton campaign's famously deep pockets.  It ran for an unimaginably long time -- three hours, I believe, though I only watched the first ninety minutes.  The format was sheer genius.  It pretended to be an actual live debate among eleven of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.  By inspired cross-cutting and photo-shopping, the producers of the commercial managed to make every one of the Republican candidates look like a blustering bully, a blithering idiot, or an ineffectual fool.

The real genius of the ad is that since it used absolutely nothing but the Republicans' own words and facial grimaces, they have no grounds for complaint.

Now if only the Sanders campaign could produce commercials like this!

2 comments:

Seth said...

LOL. Are you sure Saul Bellow didn't write that long "Clinton ad"?

http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2014/03/yet-another-bauble-from-my-files.html

Robert Paul Wolff said...

I believe that is what lit crit types call intertextuality! :)