Hasta La Creative!

They’re back! Harry and Louise, the not-so-dynamic advertising duo who helped torpedo Hillary Clinton’s healthcare reform bid in 1993-94, return in spots set to air during the Democratic and Republican conventions. Their new mission is getting Congress to make healthcare a top priority. Maybe if they’d kept their mouths shut the first time around, we’d have socialized medicine like they do in Canada, where nobody minds waiting 10 months for an appendectomy because of all the mood stabilizers they can get for free. I kid. Canada’s great. Anyway, the original Harry and Louise campaign, funded by a group of health-insurance providers, was credited with initiating a boom in public-policy advertising. Today, the landscape’s so fragmented and cluttered, they can’t possibly have the same impact or appeal. Ask another ’90s duo whose recent reunion was ignored en mass: Mulder and Scully. Maybe they were pitching healthcare reform in the recent X-Files movie. No one saw it, so we’ll never know for sure.

—Posted by David Gianatasio