During the Super Bowl, U.S. Senate candidate Pep Hoekstra (R-Michigan) ran an ad against her opponent that highlighted many of the worst aspects of the campaign season.
Here are a list of things that are wrong with this ad:
Criticism #1: Bad Economic Reasoning
While this isn't the focus of most criticism against the ad, I think it is the most important one. This ad represents a lot of economic misunderstanding prevalent in our society. Like it or not, we lived in a global economy in which global supply (the production of goods and services) and global demand (want/need for goods and services) are generally all interconnected. That means that the world's economies are all interconnected, aka "we're all in the same boat."
The premise of this ad is that if China's economy does well, ours does poorly and vice versa. This is simply not true is really stupid thinking; after all, merchantalism is largely dead. The truth is, if China's economy does well, our economy will do well. If China's economy does well, the Chinese will have more money to buy more goods, some of which will be American. Also, American companies who operate in China such as Wal-mart, Goldman Sachs, Yum! (KFC), etc. will make more money. If the American economy does well, then we have more money to buy things "Made in China." If the American economy does poorly, that means we have less money to buy Chinese goods which means fewer jobs in China and a worse Chinese economy.
For a real life example, look at the situation in Europe. Given Europe's recent struggles, we would expect China and the United States to be celebrating and rooting for an Italian and Spanish default if Pete Hoekstra's economic reasoning is true. Instead, we see that is not the case as our stock market (an indicator of how investors feel about the economy) goes down whenever there is bad news coming out of Europe and goes up when there is good news.
"Your economy get very weak, our economy get very good" is not only a mean way of making fun of hard-working immigrants trying to learn English, but also just plain stupid economic reasoning.
For those who want to know, I have a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Washington, where I graduated magna cum laude.
Criticism #2: Race Baiting
This ad plays upon people's fear of China, such as the notion of job stealing and China's holding of over $1 trillion of federal government debt. While this is a very common campaign tactic, it is not healthy for a democracy to resort to such tactics in lieu of talking substantively about the real issues or educating oneself on economics. There is also the issue that the actress was identified as "yellow girl" in the HTML code for the ad. The Hoekstra campaign has said this was a typo as was meant to say "yellowshirtgirl". However, as any person who can see color can notice, the girl is wearing an orange shirt. Either the Hoekstra campaign is too stupid to know the difference between orange and yellow (doubtful) or they are lying.
This criticism has been widely talked about around the Internet, so I won't say more about it except that in defense of Hoekstra, everyone's a little bit racist.
Criticism #3: Poor Production Quality
The Asian actress really sucks, probably a struggling actress just trying to feed herself. She starts out with an American accent and then tries to do an ethnic-based, FOB (fresh off the boat) accent (rather poorly IMO). Then she leaves out key words, making fun of how non-native English speakers talk. Given that I'm sure that they did multiple takes of the acting and the commercial probably represents the best of all of the takes, it is really embarrassing. Likely, all the good Asian actors/actresses turned down this gig because of the content.
I suspect that some junior staffers probably got fired over this ad over these many flubs. It's really embarrassing for Pete Spend-it-not.
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