Capri Cafaro Wants to Make You This Fabulous Offer!!!

The first of what threatens to be a series of Capri Cafaro infomercials aired this morning. I DVR'd it, watched it and, surprise, was underwhelmed.

While my feelings about Cafaro are well documented, my feelings about infomercials have not yet made a blog post. I just don’t get them. I don’t understand how producing a thirty minute segment and buying time for it makes economic sense. I don’t know why anyone watches.

As an insomniac, I’m presumably part of the target audience for these things, yet I’ve not sat through more than maybe five minutes of one. And that was just to try and figure out Don LaPre’s scam.

I really don’t understand how anyone can tolerate the artifice of the enterprise. An infomercial generally isn’t merely a half-hour documentary about the virtues of a product. It is instead a faux program, often in the Donahue/Oprah audience input mold, about whatever it is.

Cafaro’s infomercial fits the profile. While it is framed with the McCain/Feingold “I endorsed this message” disclaimer (or is it claimer), the majority of airtime is devoted to Cafaro speaking before a suspiciously compliant audience at a town hall meeting a UAW Local 200. All that's missing is an announcer cutting in with the obligatory infomercial buzzphrases.

Over the next thirty minutes you will learn . . .

The script has Cafaro answering questions like (and this is a quote) “Are you in favor of raising the minimum wage to put real money back into working people’s hands?” While the questions are painfully scripted, the answers are not. Cafaro is responding more or less extemporaneously – something she is not particularly good at.

Indeed, the most fascinating thing about the spot is how uninspiring she is as a speaker. She is choppy and verbally peripatetic. You can see the fingerprints of image consultants on every clever aside and self-deprecating remark. After all the anonymice posting about how good she is on the stump, I expected to see that here. Not so.

The audience for this thing is hilarious. The producers actually edit in audience shots, all of which show people wearing unmistakable I’ve-been-at-this-taping-for-five-hours-now expressions. But every time Cafaro answers a question, they burst into applause.

. . . About this revolutionary new product.

The centerpiece of this townish hallish info-thing is Cafaro’s SAW proposal – Save American Workers. The centerpiece of that is offering tax incentives to Americans buying American-made goods to make them price-competitive. To do that, Cafaro acknowledges we would have to back out of every trade treaty of the past fifteen years. She seems to think our trading partners would understand.

Meanwhile, I’m more than a little dubious about the efficacy of the proposal. Consider for a moment her audience – members of the UAW. American car manufacturers are getting shellacked by the Japanese. Have you car shopped lately? The Japanese makes are almost uniformly more expensive than American-made comparables. People buy them because they are better engineered, not because they are cheaper.

Meanwhile, the thought of people saving their receipts for more-expensive American-made household goods to take advantage of the tax rebate loses me. Unless the tax incentives make American goods significantly cheaper, the simple convenience factor will still make foreign-made goods significantly more attractive. And we haven’t even mentioned the Wal-Mart effect.

Listen to these testimonials!

Early on there’s a break in the action for endorsements. First off, some guy in a UAW T-shirt. Next, one Richard Romero, probably better known in Lorain. Google results suggest he’s a Steelworkers guy.

Later Cafaro fields a question from DeAndre in Akron. DeAndre? Hmmmm.

The most unintentionally funny moment in the entire spot is when she says that, thanks to her family’s fortune, she will be beholden to no one. Yeah, and she’s proposing giving manufacturing-segment labor unions the biggest, wettest, sloppiest kiss in the history of political panders just because she thinks it’s a good idea.

And if you act now . . .

All of this is about the primary. Cafaro is putting her faith in the received wisdom that the 13th is a lock for whoever wins the Democratic primary. She’d better be right. She is setting herself up to be portrayed as a creature of labor unions, probably the least popular Democratic interest group after trial lawyers. And her economically naïve proposal will give plenty of ammunition to whichever the Republican faces her in November. And that’s without even mentioning immunity deals or Central Park South prior addresses.

Available only through this TV offer!

An air-war expenditure so extravagant is curious. It leaves me wondering if she is putting any of her storied jack into building a grassroots organization of if she is simply counting on the unions to deliver. She may win the primary simply by playing the name-recognition game with oxygen-sucking media buys, but she will need boots on the ground in November.

But wait, there’s more!

At the end she promises another “town hall” next Sunday morning. Stay tuned.