Larry Wilson: Noem a cautionary tale for Newsom with California ad campaign

Getting your

Trinity Audioplayer ready...Remember way back when Kristi Noem insisted upon an ad campaign from the secretary of Homeland Security blasting across America’s airports? Do you also remember the many airports across the country refusing to play it, saying that not only did its political messaging violate their policies and was also likely illegal, but that the continuing loop of the secretary’s kisser would prove highly unsettling to on-edge passengers already freaked out by the everyday indignities of the TSA line?

Of course you do. Who could forget?

Well, let that adventure in large advertising dollars poorly spent by your government be a cautionary tale to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Yes, his new plan to fork out $19 million in California taxpayer money to advertise the virtues of the Golden State, a paradise to be sure that has been given a bad rap by the other 49 in recent years, pales in comparison to the $220 million in our money that Kristi Noem spent on an advertising campaign that featured her in chaps and a cowboy hat on horseback in front of Mt. Rushmore, saying: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”

Scary.

Yes, and as ProPublica reported, one of the companies that got those millions to make ads “is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides.” And, yes, “DHS invoked the ’emergency’ at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.”

So let those be cautionary tales as well to our own governor as he selects the marketing firms for this correcting-California’s-image campaign.

But, more than that, there’s a danger for the governor of this advertising campaign backfiring. Perhaps not so much in getting him fired, which is essentially what Noem’s campaign did to her. Newsom already controls the budget for the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, so he can be spendy as he pleases. And the kind of stuff that Newsom says he’ll talk about in the ads is not nearly so kinky as the “we’ll punish you” plot pursued by the discarded secretary. The governor says his intent “is to highlight California’s economic dominance and innovative spirit”, a “world-class place for business investment, relocation and expansion.”

Cool. If they’d had a chance to see that ad, maybe Yamaha wouldn’t have decamped from the OC to Georgia last week.

No, the backfire here would come from the little fact that this campaign will be promoting California just as the governor of our fair state begins in earnest his own campaign to become president of the United States.

A Newsom spokesperson says that the campaign will “tell the true story — California is a great place to live, work, invest and visit.”

I happen to believe in that story. And I know that marketing to the red states whose people have been sold the bill of goods that we’re some kind of hell hole is the right target audience here. A Texas cousin of mine came to San Francisco for the first time last year. “Oh, my God, Lawrence,” she told me over a ranch water in the Panhandle last summer, “it’s really, really beautiful there!”It is. But it is not a good look for a politician trying to go national to appear to be advertising himself, or herself, on the public dime. Noem is a former governor herself. And now she’s, um, special advisor for the Shield of the Americas. Just saying.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].