If David Allan Coe ever ran for political office, his opponent would run an attack ad on TV. A man with a deep, frightening drawl — say, Sam Elliott — would snarl something like: “Tardy alcoholic Coe arrived too late to rescue his ex-con mother from a violent death! Do we really want him to be our next senator? Not in this state!”
That indictment of Coe would be false. But because Coe crooned a vaguely similar confession once (no, repeatedly, almost nightly in honky tonks), it becomes nectar for his political opponent’s campaign manager. Coe is the outlaw country singer who, when trying to write the perfect country-music verse, penned this masterpiece:
“Well, I was drunk the day my Mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned ol’ train”
Yes, sir, anything you say — anything, ever, anywhere — can be used against you in political campaigns, especially warfare as ferocious as what we see chronicled almost nonstop on our TV screens these days.
You’ve got to wonder how much these attack ads actually accomplish. Are people really so dumb as to be influenced by this relentless cascade of negativity? Apparently so, or the marketing experts who research this stuff wouldn’t be spewing such melodrama.