Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Obama's American Stories Ad



Here is an embedded version of the thirty minute long advertisement that Mr. Obama's campaign spent 4 million dollars to put on major television stations earlier tonight. Though it has been criticized by the McCain Campaign as a stunt, I personally think that it is a smart tactic to leave a good last impression in voters minds close to election day. What do you guy's think? Will the advertisement be effective in getting voters to the polls? Was it a good idea this late in the game to make such a substantial move especially with a lead in the polls?

In other news John McCain was sounding rather senile recently, warning voters that "We're getting only a glimpse of what one-party rule will look like," while criticizing house and senate democrats for wanting to win more seats in government. Sounds a little two faced to me, at least I don't remember hearing any complaining from John McCain when the Republicans had a solid grip on the government.

2 comments:

Ben Geva said...

I don't think it will sway too many Republican voters, but it will definitely solidify the votes he already has and win a couple of undecideds. At this point he doesn't really need to win many more votes, as he already has a nice lead. The commercial helps him keep that lead, and that's what he needs to be focusing on right now.

I heard that CNN denied him the airtime because they wanted to seem unbiased, but at the same time as he was on they aired McCain on Larry King. Isn't that free air time for McCain, instead of paid airtime for Obama? Unbiased? Yeah, right.

Although it was kinda funny that FOX agreed to have him on. I guess they are trying to not seem bias by giving Democrats good air time.

Colby said...

Maybe Fox just really likes money, Ben? The infomercial was definitely a good move on Obama's part. It never once attacked John McCain and only referred to Bush as "the last eight years" so Obama won't lose people who'd be turned off by negativity. That being said, the infomercial seemed overly sappy and kind of a waste of Obama's war chest (although 4 million is probably not a lot for the Obama campaign). It focused more on tearjerking stories from around the countries than on Obama himself. Any policies he brought up were just reruns of what we've been hearing for the last several months (you < $250,000 = hooray!) But it never went any deeper than what I already knew. I wish I knew by what percentage Obama plans to cut/raise taxes on each class of income and compare it to the percentage John McCain wants. Actual numbers would sway me more than the overly generalizing "I wanna cut/he wants to raise" taxes fiasco. I saw the infomercial as a chance for him to give a great presentation with fresh material and perhaps cover all his policies in depth and maybe even contrast them (simply and without negativity) to McCain's. Instead, Obama just fell back on the same sound bites and glittering generalities I'm tired of from both candidates. I feel like Obama could have used the thirty minute infomercial for better purposes than putting on a rerun of himself. The music in the beginning sounded nice, though.