Where is Don Draper when we need him?

Draper, of course, is the iconic 1960s advertising executive who stars in the hit TV series, Mad Men. He’s a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, womanizing city slicker of questionable morals who occasionally does something brilliant. Perhaps his most memorable advertising accomplishment occurred when his firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Price, lost its lucrative account marketing Lucky Strike cigarettes.

Draper’s response was to buy a full-page ad in the New York Times that read:

“For over 25 years we devoted ourselves to peddling a product for which good work is irrelevant, because people can’t stop themselves from buying it. A product that never improves, that causes illness, and makes people unhappy. But there was money in it. A lot of money. In fact, our entire business depended on it. We knew it wasn’t good for us, but we couldn’t stop. And then, when Lucky Strike moved their business elsewhere, I realized, here was my chance to be someone who could sleep at night, because I know what I’m selling doesn’t kill my customers.”

I wonder what the man who wrote that would say about the full-page ad that appeared in a recent issue of Parade magazine, a slim Sunday supplement that is inserted in many of the nation’s largest newspapers. The ad headline reads: “Who Says Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend?” Above the headline, in four-color glory, is a picture of a rifle.

Oh, but it’s not just any rifle. This is the hand-crafted “American Beauty” by Henry. It features an etched silver panel centered with a demure yellow rose. The copy says that the Henry Company is “very proud to offer the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for the most deserving woman in your life.”

I guess there are some women who would not find this silly. Personally, I find it a frightening example of a new marketing trend that is being promoted by gun manufacturers, their lobbyists and trade associations, and the NRA. That trend is to promote firearms as an everyday accessory; something we can’t leave home without.

How else to explain the pistols in pastel colors? The purses with a special compartment for a handgun? The child-size rifle with “My First Rifle” in rhinestones? The recent emphasis on open-carry, which means that we can meet up with gun-toting grannies in the supermarket?

Don Draper the advertising guru would undoubtedly find this a marvelous marketing strategy. Make people think of a firearm as a necessary accessory, like a scarf or a billfold. Make people think that “everyone has one.” Make people feel that they deserve something special. Develop the product line to fit into various niches: a beginner rifle for kids, a sophisticated firearm for the working woman, an assault weapon for the testosterone-fueled adolescent.

But there was another Don Draper: the man who wanted to be able to sleep at night because he knew that what he was selling wasn’t killing people. Maybe that Don Draper would write this ad:

We’ve had you in our crosshairs for a while because we know that you like to feel special. You like to feel important and powerful. The firearms that we have been advertising can make you feel that way. But what we haven’t told you is that these weapons can also make you, or someone who gets in your sights, dead. We are going to dodge the bullet of responsibility and resign this account right now, because we don’t believe that buying a gun should be as easy or as pleasurable as buying a candy bar. Arms should be for hugging, not killing.

Wish you were here, Don Draper.

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In the April 1 (no fooling) episode of Mad Men, Governor Romney is called a clown. We’re talking about Michigan Governor George Romney, father of Mitt, a current Republican candidate for president.

Mad Men is loaded with harsh judgment, often distanced from fact or logic. The statement about George Romney may have been one such salvo. But Mitt, the son, is in a constant battle with competitor Rick Santorum for “foot in mouth” disease. Ironically, some of Mitt’s greatest gaffes have been related to the industry of which his father was a “captain” – the auto industry.

With the recent successes of the auto industry, the antiquated and archaic “solutions” that Romney has suggested over the past four years become more bizarre and at the least show Romney as a poor predictor. In April, 2012 we learned that in 2011, General Motors posted its largest profit ever, $7 billion.

Over the past two years,” America’s Big Three (GM,  Ford,  and  Chrysler) have added 15,000 more manufacturing jobs. Each of these jobs supports another nine jobs in the U.S. Workers at a number of plants are receiving profit-sharing bonuses of $7,000 for the success that they and their supervisors have had. But the success of the auto companies is possible only because of the direct involvement of the federal and other levels of government. As Massachusetts Democratic Senatorial candidate, Elizabeth Warren, has pointed out,

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to education. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us do.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea – God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Romney continues to criticize the January 2009 $24.9 billion loan from the federal government to General Motors and Chrysler. Prior to the financial assistance supported by President Obama and passed by Congress, Romney penned an op-ed in The New York Times entitled “Let Detroit go Bankrupt.” He favored the private sector lending money to the auto industry but he was blind to the fact that banks and other financial institutions had virtually no money to lend in 2008-09 and that included his Bain Capital, the company that he headed for fifteen years, presumably creating numerous American jobs.

Romney is quick to criticize President Obama for rising gasoline prices. For a “thinker with vision and a global perspective,” he seems to ignore the enormous global increase in demand for petroleum products over the past several years. China and India alone are guzzling gasoline at unprecedented rates. American production of refined petroleum products is higher than it’s been in eight years. None of this keeps Romney from ignoring encouraging facts about the auto industry as they roll out almost on a day-by-day basis.

Mitt Romney has been criticized for being a “flip-flopper.” However, there are two sides to every coin. The other side of a “flip-flop” coin is an open mind and willingness to be influenced by facts; to integrate new information into one’s thinking. Because Mr. Romney has developed a persistent habit of denying that he has or is changing his mind, he short-circuits his ability to make a thoughtful, considered, deliberate change in opinion when the facts warrant such. If he can’t do that with regard to the industry that was his father’s business and to which he had a reasonable amount of exposure and presumably knowledge, then it is difficult to imagine him having the depth of thinking necessary for sound domestic thinking and secure international policies.

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