Last night the Obama campaign screened a thirty minute ad on seven networks and cable stations, in effect creating their very own, post-convention and post-debates "event". Alongside all the furious on-the-ground organising that's going on in battleground states they clearly figured that they wanted to do something more at a national level to raise people's comfort levels with Obama-as-possible-president a few days before the election.The concerns that people do have about this newcomer (some of which are legitimate, some of which are nonsense, but gripping) tend to dissipate the more people actually see of him.
Now this could have gone wrong. It's an unprecedented move in presidential elections. It bumped back the World Series by half an hour. It could have come across as a massive piece of very annoying self-glorification. And maybe it did to some people. But I don't think they could have executed it much better. The Obama campaign is, if nothing else, brilliant, almost scarily so, at marketing. And this video, with its weaving of emotional vignettes about ordinary Americans with stories about Obama's policies and personal life, is as good as you'd expect.
At the end there's a cut to a live feed of Obama at a rally in Florida. But you wouldn't know it because the production values are so smooth. Which makes it kind of pointless, but anyway. Note how the candidate is assiduously branded throughout as OPTIMISM, in contrast to the vignettes, which are usually pretty sad portraits of people in distress. They're a bit like Casualty, those vignettes; they start off happy (we raised a family and built this wonderful home right here...) and you're thinking, oh shit, something's going to go really badly wrong for you isn't it...and then it does (our employer took our pension away and I fell sick and the government screwed us). And then comes Obama in a flashing ambulance.
Eve Fairbanks at TNR is very good on how the ad presented Obama as, first and foremost, a Listener.
Ben Smith calls the ad "a dramatic gesture executed in a very safe fashion" which strikes me as a pretty good description of Obama's whole candidacy.
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