This ad by Elbert Guillory has been getting a lot of praise from the right. In some ways it is quite good. It has a far more powerful narrative than the ads that came out of Karl Rove’s shop in 2012. I had forgotten what an emotionally engaging center-right ad even looked like.

The substantive elements of the ad were less good. The line about food stamps and Kool -Aid was a jaw dropper in a bad way. The stuff about Mary Landrieu’s house will only work if people have already been given a reason not to like her.

What the ad lacks is an appeal to issues that can separate a bloc of voters from their pre-existing partisan loyalties. A larger fraction of Latino and African American voters avow center-right policy preferences on the economy and social policy than voted for Mitt Romney. Those voters won’t be won over by talking about the home size of prominent Democrats. They might be won over if those voters can be presented with a clearer choice between their values on the one hand and their partisan loyalty on the other. If Democrats can be presented as the party of middle-class tax increases, late-term abortions, and higher health insurance premiums, while Republican present a middle-class-oriented agenda of their own, then those right-leaning Obama voters might eventually be brought over to voting for a politics that combines moderate social conservatism with moderate economic conservatism.

What the Guillory ad gets right is the tone. Breaking one’s partisan voting habit is hard. Those right-leaning Obama voters are going to need powerful reasons. Those reasons could include the national Democratic party’s extremism on the subject of late-term fetuses, and the way that the left’s spending priorities are going to impact people who aren’t rich.

The Republican campaigns that make those points won’t have to be mean, but they will have to be tough. Those Republican campaigns will sound a lot more like Elbert Guillory’s ad than Ken Mehlman’s apologies to the NAACP. A necessary (but insufficient) condition of any successful GOP strategy for winning over nonwhites is that it will make liberal journalists and activists howl in pain rather than purr with self-satisfaction.

There is one thing that some of the commentary on the Guillory ad gets wrong. Robert Tracinski writes that the right needs a strategy to “convert black voters by finding and promoting leaders who can speak to them convincingly about the failure of the Democrats’ welfare state”.

I think that gets the strategy backwards. There is not going to be a savior or a pack of saviors who convince nonwhite voters to vote Republican. Colin Powell wasn’t going to do it. J.C. Watts and Herman Cain weren’t going to do it, and neither will six dozen Elbert Guillorys. Republicans will convert more nonwhite voters when they find something convincing to say and then invest the time and money it takes to get a hearing from voters who don’t consume much right-leaning media. When Republicans figure out a strategy to win over a larger share of the nonwhite vote, that strategy will work about as well for reasonably competent candidates of all backgrounds. Until then, there will be no saviors, and no appeals to personal experience will be enough.