It’s taken awhile, but we finally able to continue our series of reviews of the first TV ads by Houston’s mayoral candidates. Peter Brown came out with one a month ago (not that you see it all that much), and now Annise Parker is on the air.
Here are the five things we take away from Parker’s ad:
1. She personally fights crime. Police sirens ominously wailing, a darkened street living in fear, officers trying to get to the bottom of either a heinous crime or a TP-ing of a house? Annise Parker is there, ready to pat the police on the back. Literally.
2. But she doesn’t fight it too often. We have to assume this, because the same crime-scene-backpatting footage is used at the beginning and the end of the 30-second ad. Or maybe the campaign was just so proud of that particular backpat that they showed it twice.
3. Actual Houston cops? No back-pats for you. HPD officers can’t
appear in political ads in uniform, so the cops in this ad have a patch
on their sleeve that looks like the logo of a generic security company.
It has some kind of eagle on it, as far as we can tell.
4. Parker doesn’t care about finding waste in budgets. Sure, she says she does, but does she visibly wince when looking at a budget like
Brown did? No. She just talks calmly to her staff. Not to mention that
she never — not even once — points energetically like Brown did. Of course, not many people can point as energetically as Brown did in his ad.
5. Who she looks like in the ad: Much tougher to tell than with Brown. Hmmm….perhaps some weird hybrid
between Hillary Clinton and a slimmed-down Kathy Kinney, who played
Mimi on the Drew Carey Show?
This article appears in Best Of Houston 2009.