El Paso or Melilla, the Main Thing Is It’s in the USA

Marco Rubio transplants Vancouver to the United States, and Donald Trump moves the southern U.S. border to North Africa. Geography grade: Unsatisfactory.

The first geographic clue words in Marco Rubio’s latest campaign spot are, “It’s morning again in America,” highly reminiscent of the theme Ronald Reagan used in his 1984 campaign.

Rubio, who was successful in pulling off a surprise in Iowa but got slapped down in New Hampshire, finishes the one-minute clip with a bleak summary of the Obama administration. So far, so unsurprising.

But what’s comical is the video material the spot uses. The opening narrative is accompanied by a background video that certainly looks American enough but is, in fact, Canadian: A tugboat flying a maple leaf flag cruises in front of the Vancouver, British Columbia, skyline. How embarrassing.

Rubio creates a collage of his nation using pictures of foreign places. But that apparently fits in with good electioneering; Jeb Bush uses foreign images in his TV spots as well. He recently summarily Americanized a sunrise over a field in Cornwall as well as construction sites in Southeast Asia.

From North Africa to North America

Donald Trump, the loudest mouth campaigning, naturally has to be included in this group. His campaign team apparently didn’t think that actual pictures of illegal immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border were dramatic enough to represent Trump’s racist immigration policy ideas, so the first Trump spot showed migrants in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa as they attempted to scale a fence. The deception was exposed by the PolitiFact.com website.

Ted Cruz, on the other hand, has not yet made any geographic blunders but he did have to pull one of his TV spots when it was discovered that one of the performers in it already had a career behind her in pornographic flicks. In order to avoid such a faux pas in the future, the Republicans might want to consider casting only kids waving the Stars and Stripes as some of their spots already do.

Maybe the aforementioned visual boo-boos haven’t really registered yet with Americans. Many movies with an American setting are shot in Vancouver, the third largest movie capital in North America and where Marco Rubio opens his campaign ad. YouTube contributor Tony Zhou explored this fact in his video “Vancouver Never Plays Itself.” For Republicans, it’s not so far-fetched because 30 percent of them are in favor of attacking cities that don’t even exist whereas only 20 percent of Democrats are.