September 27, 2007
GOP Adman Becomes ONE With Poverty
Bush-Cheney ‘04 adman Fred Davis has joined the Bono-endorsed anti-poverty ONE Vote '08 campaign as its sole media consultant.
“It’s nice to be on the side of all of humanity this time,” said Davis. “ONE is such a large undertaking that we consider it a replacement for work in the presidential primaries.”
Davis was chief creative consultant on Sen. John McCain’s White House run until leaving the cash-challenged campaign last July, and last year he consulted on former Sen. Bill Frist’s testing-the-waters ‘08 aspirations. Now Frist and former Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle are co-chairs of ONE’s “Vote ‘08” effort with Davis creating ads built on persuading ‘08 candidates to make genuine anti-poverty commitments.
“Very simple little challenge, don’t you think?” said Davis. “It’s an attempt to get politicians in America to understand that poverty is such a vital worldwide issue. Helping find solutions to poverty could so affect the way the world perceives the United States."
Davis’s Los Angeles-based media firm Strategic Perception started working on ONE ideas last week, joining ex- B-C ‘04 chief strategist Matthew Dowd who signed on recently as ONE’s chief strategist. (Check out Dowd’s personal website www.livegentle.com, where he’s writing about his current, three-week spiritual pilgrimage through India)
Davis and Dowd answer to ONE president/CEO Susan McCue, formerly chief of staff to Senate Maj. Leader Harry Reid, with McCue ranked No. 47 on GQ magazine’s “50 Most Powerful People in D.C.” The U2 front man Bono has been a public face for ONE since its 2004 founding by major development and relief agencies. But McCue has had free reign to create her bi-partisan team with advisors such as Dem strategist Donna Brazile and Bush global communications strategist Tucker Eskew (who with Dowd was one of four founders of consulting firm Via Novo).
In an e-mail, McCue stated that ONE is, “building aggressive grassroots operations on the ground and will have a sophisticated media overlay.” With serious dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ONE lobbies Capitol Hill for global debt cancellation, worldwide clean water, African AIDS treatment, etc.
Besides ONE, this fall’s ‘07 cycle finds Davis working on Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher’s re-election bid and creating the Republican Governors Association ads for U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal’s second try at moving into the Governor's mansion in Baton Rogue. Davis’s ‘08 commitments include the Senate re-election bids of North Carolina’s Elizabeth Dole, Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe and Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, plus N.C. businessman/attorney Bill Graham’s gubernatorial run. [DAVID FINNIGAN]
Posted at 12:44 PM
Comments
Just seeing the list of GOP luminaries like Fred Davis, Tucker Eskew and Matthew Dowd makes the cynic in me wonder if there's more than a little penance going on here.
corinne | 09.27.07 02:42 PM
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Apparently there is nothing these guys won't do for a buck.
I wonder how they are going to sell a ONE PERCENT increase in the federal budget (30 Billion or so per year) to a public that, by most accounts, think government spending is already out of control.
The ONE Campaign takes its name from their plan to extort a committment from each presidential candidate to advocate for earmarking a ONE PERCENT increase in the federal budget for their program of support for the UN Millennium Development Goals.
Smell a rat?
Curly Haugland | 09.28.07 12:11 PM
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