Jerry Brown's Fart Gives Rick Perry the Halo Effect

In advertising, the term “halo effect” describes what happens when a newspaper, TV station or other entity promotes your product via an article or TV segment that delivers a favorable report. (Which may well have started with a press release you submitted over the transom.) The idea is that, if the newspaper is talking about your product, it’s a tacit endorsement, giving it a PR boost that even expensive advertising can’t deliver. (See also: favorable movie and restaurant reviews in a newspaper.)

As Moe Lane writes, Jerry Brown’s thuggish bluster has just given Rick Perry’s modest ad campaign a major league PR boost:

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I can’t believe that Jerry Brown led with his chin with this one:

Gov. Jerry Brown publicly scoffed at Gov. Rick Perry’s attempt to draw Californians to Texas for better business, saying that the ad campaign is “barely a fart.”

[snip]

Brown told reporters that if Perry wanted to be taken seriously, he would have to spend at least $25 million on radio and television ads. The ad paid for by TexasOne was a mere $24,000, which, Brown mockingly called “the smallest entry into the media market of California.”

(Audio of the ad here; text here)

…And, yet it was enough of an ad buy to get the Governor of California to respond  – and by ‘respond’ I mean ‘sound like a spluttering eight year old in public.’  Not to mention make sure that the ad got talked about all over the state, instead of just in the six stations that it originally aired in.  And, given that the message – which was a very simple Fly, all y’all damfools – came through loud and clear over Radio Station Moonbeam, I have to ask: what was Brown’s goal, here*?  …Because I never would have heard about any of this if the Governor of California hadn’t bawled like a stuck calf.

And speaking of the difference between two men, as Jennifer Rubin writes, the left is angry — but then, when aren’t they — because the right is acting too cheerful. The left would much prefer that you share the same mindset they inhabit, as personified by Jerry Brown’s day-to-day demeanor: