Both Chrysler and Clint Eastwood defended their two-minute Super Bowl commercial against pundits who said it was more of a pro-President Barack Obama political statement than a car ad.
“The ad is not intended to have a political message, but rather one of American pride and job growth,” a representative from Malpaso Productions, Eastwood’s Burbank, Calif., production studio told the Free Press on Monday.
In Sunday’s commercial, Eastwood talks about the challenges still facing America as both the country and Chrysler work to fully recover from the recession of 2008 and 2009.
“It has zero political content,” Chrysler and Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne said in an interview Monday with Paul W. Smith on WJR-AM 760. “Americans unfortunately have got this bad habit of short-selling themselves internationally. I travel the world and … I’ve had a chance to see firsthand how other places work and how they view life and I think that the fundamental values that drive this country are sacred and I think they should be protected at all costs because they’re what makes this place magic and we should not fool around with them.”
From the moment it aired Sunday night,
pundits of various stripes viewed the ad through their respective political prisms. Both Democratic and Republican commenters saw it as a message of support of the incumbent administration and its bailout of the auto industry.
“Saving the American Auto Industry: Something Eminem and Clint Eastwood can agree on,” tweeted Dan Pfeiffer, a White House communications director.
On Fox News, Karl Rove, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, was offended by it.
“I’m a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but …the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.”
Chrysler last May repaid all the loans made to it by the Obama administration six years before required. At the same time Fiat, which owns 58.5% of Chrysler, bought the U.S. government’s equity stake in Chrysler. The only U.S. aid Chrysler has not repaid is what it received from the Bush administration.
Chrysler also reported a profit of $183 million for 2011, its first full-year profit since 2005. The federal government has no role in managing the company.
Eastwood has spoken out against federal loans provided to Chrysler, General Motors and some of the world’s largest financial institutions.
But Marchionne told WJR that “there was not a single doubt in my mind that when he spoke on the commercial he was expressing his views.”
“It’s halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they’re hurting. And they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback,” Eastwood says in the commercial. The factory scenes were from Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant.
The NFL briefly cut off Chrysler’s access to run the spot on YouTube after Sunday night’s game.
Sometime Sunday night, the video was removed from YouTube, which posted a message saying: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NFL Properties.”
“The NFL did not file a copyright complaint about this ad with Google,” said NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy.
But a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement that the video distributor “expeditiously removes content when it receives a copyright notification from copyright owners, or from third-party agencies operating on their behalf. We reinstate content when we receive a retraction from the party who originally submitted the notification. The video has been reinstated.”
Free Press staff writer B.J. Hammerstein contributed to this report.