Chrysler Ad an Appeal to the Tea Party?

Chrysler won the ire of the Tea Party movement when it borrowed billions of dollars from the federal government, but it may be trying to win the Tea Partiers back with a new ad that largely borrows from the movement's themes.

An ad called "Freedom" for the Dodge Challenger depicts an impending battle in the Revolutionary War. The Redcoats are ready, muskets poised, to take on enemy troops, when three Dodge Challengers zoom toward them, large American flags flying out the window. George Washington is behind the wheel of one of the cars. The Redcoats go running.

"Here's a couple of things America got right," a narrator says. "Cars -- and freedom."

The Washington Post contends the ad, which first aired during the World Cup, is part of a trend in which companies are appealing to the current anti-establishment mood gripping the country, especially Tea Partiers.

"People who are closely identified with the Tea Party movement feel very much this sense of betrayal," J. Walker Smith, executive vice president of the Futures Company, a market research firm, told the Post. "They feel very much betrayed by a lot of the institutions and people they have invested their trust in. This creates a situation for a lot of companies as they try to navigate how best to appeal to consumers in this environment."

Tea Party groups have paid close attention to the automaker bailouts from 2008 and 2009 that have cost the federal government billions of dollars. Chrysler came close to running out of cash and being dismantled in late 2008 when the U.S. government authorized more than $15 billion in aid for the company and later came to an agreement with the Italian car company Fiat SpA to run the new Chrysler that emerged out of bankruptcy.

A representative for Chrysler told the Washington Post the company was sensitive to the fact that its "Freedom" ad was in part paid for by U.S. tax dollars, so they saved money by using old costumes from a Mel Gibson movie.