Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has a long way to go before becoming mayor of New York City. (As in, nobody’s voted yet. Voters go to the polls next month for the primary; then there’s the general election in November.) But if de Blasio—an unabashedly liberal/populist Democrat running for a seat held by corporate-friendly Republicans for the past 20 years—does win, this stunningly good and powerful TV ad will have played a role.
Part of what makes “Dante” (the ad’s title) work is the seemingly genuine and genuinely unpolished behavior it captures: Dante’s confidence in speaking on camera married with the fact he’s obviously reading a script (after all, who’s going to trust a 15-year old who’s too polished a TV performer). The warm-but-not-smooth shots of candidate DeBlasio at home with his wife, Chirlane. The closing shot of Dante and his father walking down a sidewalk, both smiling, neither looking at the camera (or each other), fading out with Bill (warmly but slightly awkwardly) patting his son (happily, approvingly) on the back. For an ad aimed at introducing a candidate’s personal side to the voters, it’s tough to beat.
But there’s a lot more going on here. “Dante” is a 30 second blizzard of punches at the post-Goldwater conservative movement that has dominated much of American politics and culture for most of de Blasio’s adult life. Let us count the ways:
Dante de Blasio’s say-it-loud-I’m-black-and-I’m-proud 6 inch Afro;
“the only Democrat with the guts to break from the Bloomberg years”—code for ending NYC’s unconstitutional “stop-and-frisk” policing that also serves as a metaphor for the Bloomberg administration’s obsession with making New York (and especially Manhattan) feel “safe” for affluent whites (whether of the suburban, tourist or Wall Street varieties) at the expense of the city’s Asian, Latino and African-American working and middle-class majority;
“raise taxes on the rich to fund early childhood and after-school programs”—balm to the ears of New Yorkers who’ve seen wealth and income inequality rise to its highest levels since the 1920s, and as unapologetic about the issue as any white NY politician since Sen. Robert Kennedy;
“the boldest plan to build affordable housing”—a cause largely abandoned even by center-left Democrats (see: Obama, foreclosure crisis, failure to address)
“the only one who will end a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color”—for those who can’t hear code language (see #2 above);
“and I’d say that even if he weren’t my dad”—as the worst fears of social reactionaries, which have been building for the previous 27 seconds, explode into their eyes and ears.
What makes “Dante” even more powerful is how normal the ad makes all of this seem. Indeed, a large part of its cultural resonance is with the growing—predominantly but not exclusively urban—faction of Americans for whom the world encapsulated in miniature by “Dante” is their “normal”: Taking as a fact of life that the rich are too rich…and that should change. Taking it as a given that—in the absence of any other institution powerful enough to constrain corporate greed run amok—the times call for a more vigorous, activist government that will act on behalf of working people and their children. Living with interracial and multiethnic families, schools, neighbors, teams, friends, workplaces as both a norm and a social good.
All of this is largely outside the experience of the uncomfortable coalition of plutocrats, nativists and neo-segregationists who make up the dominant faction of the conservative movement in the United States today. And because it is outside their experience, it is—on some level—terrifying to them.
And this is the final way in which “Dante” is a punch straight to the face of today’s semi-hysterical conservatism. It says, in effect, not only are you wrong (about what will happen if taxes are raised on the wealthy, if corporations have less power, if young people grow long hair, get tattoos, wear hoodies, if people marry whom they love), but when you lose you’ll find out that all you’ve really lost…is your fears.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/