Ted Cruz was forced to pull a campaign ad after it was discovered that one of the actors in the video had previously appeared in soft pornography, while his Republican presidential rival Marco Rubio announced that it was “morning in America” with a clip of Vancouver, Canada.
But Rubio and Cruz are far from the only presidential hopefuls to run advertisements featuring flubs or misinformation. Here’s a look at some of the ads their competitors on both sides of the aisle are currently running, many of which are even more problematic.
- A recent clip promoting John Kasich suggests that he is capable of cramming an entire sleeve of Ritz crackers into his mouth and then whistling the Battle Hymn of the Republic – a feat that Kasich has repeatedly failed to pull off on the campaign trail and throughout his time in office as governor of Ohio.
- Last month, an advertisement released in hopes of reviving Jeb Bush’s floundering presidential campaign mistakenly included Bush family home video of the teenage Jeb getting both of his hands caught in mousetraps, then getting both feet caught while trying to free himself.
- A new television spot promoting Bernie Sanders to younger voters begins with Sanders claiming he is capable of performing a flawless frontside nose grind on his skateboard, but then in the ensuing ad Sanders only pulls off a few 50-50 grinds and a sort of sloppy kickflip.
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Hillary Clinton’s famous 3am video from 2008, which posited that Clinton was the best and most experienced candidate to handle any emergency situation that might befall the American people, suggested that Clinton occasionally sleeps, something that has recently been disproved by one of the 26 congressional committees investigating Benghazi. As the committee explained at a rowdy press conference on the steps of Capitol Hill and in a 482-page report on the subject, Clinton does not sleep. It is true that she must occasionally be plugged into a recharging chamber, but she is never actually unconscious at any point in that process.
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Dr Ben Carson, onetime frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, has released several advertisements targeting Doozers, those little green creatures from the television series Fraggle Rock. In the ads, which Carson self-financed, he refers to the Doozers as “the adorable backbone of the American infrastructure” and promises to keep them safe from Gargamel … who discerning consumers of children’s entertainment might know is actually the nemesis to the Smurfs, which is a completely different show.
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Donald Trump has released several videos claiming that he is the only candidate who can “make America great again”. Although that is indisputably true, the commercials also suggest that Trump is a human man, and not – as is actually the case – a mass of orange clay molded into human form and given life through that ectoplasm from Ghostbusters 2 that responds to negative emotions.
- A recent advertisement released only in Canada and Cuba by Cruz suggests that if he became president, his Canadian birthright and Cuban parentage would automatically make him prime minister of Canada and president of Cuba too, leading to a union-of-the-crowns-style merging of the US, Canada and Cuba. In fact, Cuba’s president Raúl Castro has not yet agreed to this proposal.
