New GOP ads blast Obama

The GOP have launched two new ads against Obama...

The ads are pretty effective in my opinion. 

They take the most direct and effective route to attacking Obama, using his own words to define whether or not he has failed. By his own verbiage Obama has indeed failed. 

However, the GOP also use the message 'Are you better off?' (than four years ago). 

That's a tricky message to be using because the reality is that it's not as simple as that. 

Are most people better off? Definitely not.
 

But are they better off than if Obama hadn't done the things he did? They definitely are. 

But have the things Obama did to stop the crash in the short term, put the whole system at even greater risk in the long run? Definitely (the banking sector has become an even bigger ponzi scheme than it was in 2008. And if it crashes, will cause far more damage than in 2008).

And if you get in to various demographics the answer changes there again.

If you are poor, are you better off? Nope, no one was lifted out of poverty during Obama's term. 

If you want peace are you better off? Nope, the wars continued. 

If you wanted Osama Bin Laden dead, are you better off? Yep, because he's dead. 

Anyway, you get the point. So using the 'Are you better off?' message is tricky because you don't know what issue people will use to judge whether they are better off or not. 

Financially most people are not better off. But then again, you can borrow money today at incredibly low interest rates (thanks to Ben Bernanke). So perhaps their increased ability to carry debt offsets in their minds their stagnant or reduced income. 

Here in Canada the car companies are now offering financing at 0% for 84 months - think about that, 0% loans for seven years! While some people may think that is good because they can afford a car, others (like myself) think it is bad because it is encouraging reckless loans and destroying the returns savers get from things like bonds. Easy money is NOT good money (at least not in the long term, short term it feels good though). 

Personally I would have stayed away from the better off message.  If people are not better off, trust me, they will hold that view without you prodding them to do so. 

The real message should revolve around four central pillars:

• Did Obama do what he said he would?
• Does he have a plan to deal with the debt?
• Why would another four years under Obama be any different than the past four year?
• Why has he passed legislation that is anti-constitutional (such as the NDAA, attempt to pass SOPA, and continues to endorse the Patriot Act). 

The GOP have done a good job addressing the first two. But to take Obama down, they will also have to address the other two, which collectively show that Obama is NOT going to save the world or protect the rights of citizens. 

Now, the GOP probably won't address those last two because they are just as bad as Obama. They endorse things like NDAA, SOPA and the Patriot Act. And four years under the GOP will be no different than Obama, with the only real difference being unions will get broken up under the GOP. 

Either way, the GOP has come out swinging in a pretty convincing fashion.

One of the main reasons people voted for Obama was that they felt they could trust him. And as anyone will tell you, trust is the absolute highest quality a brand can have. Brand equity is all about key stakeholders trusting you. 

So the GOP's objective here is bring it home to people that they cannot trust Obama. 

Obama, ironically, will fight back by saying you cannot trust Romney, and hope that in the end it offsets the GOP's message. 

It probably will, which is why I've been predicting for a while now that voter turn-out for this election may be the lowest in US history simply because both candidates have been torn down so much that most people likely have little faith or trust in either of them.