Dec 12, 2014 5 min read

Debbie Flaherty is president of Day automobile dealers. I know this because I watch television, and Flaherty has made any number of TV commercials which have transformed new car advertising in western Pennsylvania.

Since Flaherty began hawking her car lots on the air a series of copycat ads have appeared.

The commercials share at least one characteristic: an attractive woman serving as pitch-person.

These commercials prove, once again, that imitation is the purest form — not a pun — of flattery.

Then again, most people gravitate to what is popular, to what’s en vogue. And that explains a lot about this tired old world.

It’s why-me-too-ism is rampant. From the purely trivial — for example, as as a golfer, I am mystified why other golfers wear golf gloves- to the serious.

A case in point: over the last several years, police departments went fairly crazy in their use of heavily-armed SWAT teams. At times, the SWAT team mentality seemed to overtake sound local policing.

I’m convinced a great deal of this stemmed from officials — at least initially — following not their heads and hearts but the old idea that if the neighboring police department was doing it, by gum, we better do it, too.

Back to Flaherty and those commercials. The camera loves her. She’s just unprofessional enough so as not to appear practiced.

On screen, she’s both a smart cookie and a real charmer.

In reality, she may be a trained actress, hard as nails, a real ditz.

It doesn’t matter, because her commercial persona has worked a revolution.

Only a stubborn few car dealers are sticking to the old format: a slightly crazed middle-aged man — in most cases, the dealership manager — making a loud, insistent sales pitch. He’s working hard to be funny. Too hard. He’s a checkered sports coat, a fat man at the Golden Corral. Subtle, he’s not.

In contrast, the commercials pioneered by Flaherty are quiet, decorous — they are soft-serve pitches attuned to a new consumerism. It’s fascinating, and instructive, how much they resemble the Tom Wolf political commercials that sealed his selection as the Democratic nominee for governor and later against Gov. Corbett.

Like Flaherty, Wolf displays an affinity for the camera. No director, no matter how talented, is talented enough to teach what both Flaherty and Wolf demonstrate in spades: a disarming naturalness,

In the event New York and Los Angeles advertising agencies get wind of their success, the national commercials in our immediate future are likely to be populated by Debbie Flaherty and Tom Wolf types. Difficult as they are to pull off, they nevertheless will become “the thing to do” — an irresistible force sweeping all before it.

But isn’t that the way, as a general rule, America works?

Every few years or months we hop aboard a bandwagon of one kind or another. Many times it’s for novelty purposes only — the Hula Hoop, mood rings, and (one can hope) Miley Cyrus.

In the 1950s, parents endured a Davy Crockett-Fess Parker craze, when, thanks to Disney, their kids donned (fake) coonskin caps and (equally fake) buckskin pants.

Fifty some years later, the newest generation of Americans experienced “Frozen,” the Disney (some things never change) movie which sought to answer the musical question, “How many times can they sing it?” as in the ubiquitous, big-throated “Let It Go.”

Now, for more serious stuff: Most of the nation’s founders worried about the influence of the “mob” on politics. Their answer to the rule of passion — that is, “the people” — consisted of reigning in democracy.

The three branches of government, each jealously guarding its own prerogatives; the electoral college, whereby presidents are not chosen directly by voters but by designated representatives of the states, are but two examples of the founders’ fear of unbridled popular choice, and their determination to place a brake on what is merely popular running our politics and our public policy.

The years have not been kind to the founders’ vision.

More and more we seem to be ruled by passing fancies that come and go with the regularity of Disney blockbusters.

How much of our passion for early Barack Obama came about because he was trending? The same can be asked of the tea party. Was that a fad or what?

Is it really the case that Americans believe the Affordable Care Act is a negation of our liberties as well as unworkable? Or is their opposition a reflection of the thing to be?

For that matter, today’s automatic condemnation of all things governmental surely owes something to the notion that such condemnations are expected of people.

And might the public reaction to events in Ferguson, Mo., have something to do with what’s trending or what’s expected or what’s en vogue?

Consider: in the immediate aftermath of the grand jury decision not to charge police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, Americans were split down the middle, 40-plus percent approved, 40-plus percent disapproved.

Don’t you think it’s kind of strange, considering the ambiguities involved, that more people didn’t fall into the “I’m not sure” category?

But then, again, this is America, where the next bandwagon is only moments away.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books of local history: Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com