Image of elephant killing rhinoceros from Andrew Thomas’ new attack ad. YouTube
First there was the demon sheep from California. Then came John McCain’s Dracula. Now, a Republican running for Arizona attorney general has released an attack ad showing his opponent’s campaign coming to a rather violent end.
In a political season where some of the strangest attack ads in memory have found huge audiences by going viral on YouTube, former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas has come out with a 60-second spot that promises to up the ante. Call it the dead rhino ad.
It is meant to trumpet Thomas’ conservative values while painting his primary opponent, state schools superintendent Tom Horne, as a secret liberal. The ad, apparently set in the wilds of Africa, portrays Thomas as a hulking conservative elephant and Horne as a “Republican in name only” rhinoceros (a RINO, get it?).
But that’s where things get weird. About 40 seconds in – and there’s really no delicate way to put this – the ad shows the elephant attacking the rhinoceros, killing it, and then standing atop its dead body in victory.
“When elephants and rhinos battle each other in the wild,” the narrator says, “the elephants emerge victorious.”
One can even make out the elephant’s tusk, broken off and impaled in the dead rhinoceros before the video fades to Thomas standing at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Thomas’ campaign strategist, Jason Rose, said no one should read too much into the animal death scene.
“There is no intention to have inappropriate imagery,” said Rose, who took credit for the ad’s concept and said “it resonated with the candidate.”
“There is, as you can imagine, limited inventory of (video showing) elephants and rhinos in the wild,” Rose added. “That’s why we used words like ‘triumph’ in the ad.”
Horne said he wasn’t concerned about the violent images as much as the accusations that he wasn’t Republican enough to win the GOP primary.
“I’m the exact opposite of a RINO,” Horne said. “I’ve made conservative principles work as superintendent of schools. I eliminated bilingual education. I raised standards. I raised test scores.”
Thomas’ ad follows a string of strange campaign attacks this year. Most recently, Arizona Sen. John McCain released one that essentially called his primary challenger, former Congressman J.D. Hayworth, a whacko conspiracy theorist who believes in Dracula.
But Thomas’ ad perhaps most closely resembles the attack put out in February by Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina of California. Her ad fashioned her Republican primary opponent, Tom Campbell, as a sheep with glowing red eyes, who she deemed a “Fiscal Conservative In Name Only.”
The attacks, however outlandish, seem to work – at least if viewership means anything. McCain’s ad, released Monday, has already been watched on YouTube almost 200,000 times. Fiorina’s has been watched more than 750,000 times.
See the new Thomas ad for yourself: