Chris Kelly has taken to new media in his pursuit of the state Attorney General’s office, and why not? The Palo Alto lawyer is after all a former Facebook executive (he was their chief privacy officer) and this is the era of politicking via Twitter and YouTube.
Kelly, whose $4.1 million campaign war chest includes $4 million of his own money, last week launched an attack ad aimed at San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris.
Keeping with the new media theme, the dis was disseminated to this reporter via Google ads, popping up Sunday morning in an e-mail inbox.
The somewhat dry two-minute long spiel is an amalgam of local SF television news broadcasts dealing with such Harris career highlights as the choices to not pursue the death penalty in the Bologna slayings and the murder of SF police officer Isaac Espinoza.
There’s footage of an unidentified cop slamming the DA, but the ad also includes some dubious claims, already pounced upon by the Examiner. The paper points out that the Kelly ad’s claim that “SF has the highest homicide rate in the state” is a tough one to make, considering the city had the lowest murder total in five decades in 2009, and has a smaller, violenter city across the Bay in Oakland.
The Harris campaign fired back Monday at Kelly “[the] privacy expert, who has undoubtedly expertly placed [the ad] on your Facebook homepage, Google searches, email inbox, or all three in recent days,” according to a memo sent out by Harris spokesman Brian Brokaw. Brokaw also noted that “the Facebook candidate” (Kelly) has only 9,000 “fans” on the social networking site to 21,000 plus for Harris (one of whom, the Appeal cannot resist to note, is Reese Witherspoon, who played a lawyer in the movies and donated to Kamala in real life).
The Kelly campaign HQ has yet to respond to a request for comment placed yesterday, but in the meantime, readers can certainly speculate: first, this isn’t the best ad $4 million can buy, so what else is in the mix?
Kelly is admittedly all about innovation — he uses the word or a variant thereof five times in a two-minute “Why I Am Running” speech (He also uses “sexual predators” three times, for those keeping score at home). There is a vast difference between a YouTube ad with (as of Monday) 500 views and a 30-second TV spot seen by millions, so more is sure to come, to your TV screen and your Gmail account.
