Leveraging the Corpse of Reagan

Senator John McCain
228 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear John,

I hope you’ve had a chance to review the Hardball clip in which a titillated Chris Matthews carries on about Fred Thompson’s olfactory characteristics and sex appeal. I know, I know…I was embarrassed too. But Chris revealed something important about Fred: he has obviously mastered the art of fragro-campaigning.

Clearly if you want to have any chance of salvaging your own campaign, you’ll need a scent-identity all your own. And I’ve been in the lab working on it. At first I thought “new car scent!” But that was too fresh…too…car-salesmanish—it tended to evoke images of Mitt Romney. Flowery scents didn’t work at all—they all came up “Rudy in drag.” No…we needed something to leverage your campaign’s general state of decay and old-school feel into a positive image.

And we found it: humus. You know that…ripe compost smell…l'eau de la matière de decomposition. Nothing transforms deterioration and rot into imagery of fresh potential and new life quite like the scent of humus.

Metaphorically, this is exactly the kind of turn-around your campaign needs. A small down-side is that it evokes “Bob Dole” for some people. On the other hand, even more people identify the odor with Ronald Reagan. That’s a piece of Reagan that none of the other candidates can snatch away from you.

Just imagine what it will do for your campaign when Chris Matthews says on national TV, “Senator McCain even smells like Ronald Reagan!”

Yours verily,
Darryl
HominidViews