Obama’s TV spot pulls together campaign themes

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With its plaintive, Ken Burnsian soundtrack, real-life stories of economic hardship and greatest hits compilation of soaring rhetoric, Barack Obama’s 30-minute campaign-o-mercial, which ran on CBS, NBC, MSNBC and Fox last night, was confident, competent and moving, a piece of political television so aware of its own mission and the demands of the medium it could have easily been titled “As You Like It.”

Here was Obama speaking, from an Oval Office-esque setting, precisely as voters of every stripe have been pleading with the candidates to speak—without rancor, without opponent bashing, in comprehensible, if not overly concise, terms about the major issues facing Americans today: Rising prices, declining property values, a fraying healthcare system, the energy crisis, the war in Iraq.

Here were a wide variety of people who support him—Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson—the family who loves him, the American people to whom he has listened. It was a multimillion dollar closing pitch to undecided voters, a third act monologue designed to pull all the narrative threads of his campaign together.

Six days out and Obama wanted to remind everyone that he is on the side of the middle class—let big business look out for itself because, historically, it always does anyway. Six days out and he clearly intends to end the same way he began, with a widely watched call for Change.

People will no doubt compare this bit of campaign history to “An Inconvenient Truth” (if only because its director Davis Guggenheim worked on this too), or Ross Perot’s forgettable infomercials or even Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats, if they, as Obama’s running mate erroneously suggested, had indeed been televised. This was Obama’s final call-back for the Ultimate Audition, his last solo before the phone lines are opened for the crucial vote.

Yet for some reason, I kept thinking of “Mad Men,” particularly of that scene at the end of Season One when advertising maven Don Draper stood in the darkened room and so evocatively sold the new circular slide projector as the carousel because it returns us to a place where we know we are loved. For all the emphasis on change, these 30 minutes were infused with nostalgia—that heartstring-plucking guitar, those black and white images of ‘40s and ‘50s America, the homage to the traditional family, the apparent non-existence of pressing social issues—no abortion, no gay rights, not even childcare was mentioned.

It was as if Obama were consciously offering a soothing counterbalance to the seismic shift that his mere presence, much less his success and possible victory, in this presidential election indicates. Throughout this campaign he has offered an oasis of calm, an unflappable demeanor that occasionally drives even his most rabid supporters mad. But it is his game plan and he is sticking to it. Don’t be frightened, he seems to say, by the fact that my name, my face will interrupt the homogeneous lineage of the presidency. I come from a place of hope, not anger. I share your value of the past, of the children skipping rope in the suburbs, of the fathers returning home covered with oil from a day in the factory, even if I do not necessarily share those memories.

“All of us have a story,” Obama tells us in a clip from an earlier speech, of parents or grandparents who came from another place but wanted America’s freedom for their children, of parents or grandparents who did not have a college degree or their own home but hoped for these for their children. All of us, in other words, are connected by blood to someone who was once a stranger in this land or the first of a family or group to break through society’s preconceptions.

From the moment he appeared on the national stage in 2004, Barack Obama has been fixated on the future, on changing the future, on creating a government that is, in his mind and the minds of his supporters, better prepared for and more answerable to the future. Change. It’s a fun word to chant, and a catchy word for a placard. But change, no matter how necessary or beneficial, is always frightening and rarely easy.

So as much as it was a summation, a return to early exhortations to remember that ‘United’ is part of our country’s legal name, Obama’s info-drama gave Americans 30 minutes of the present to honor the past. And then, of course, connect it to his version of the future.

--Mary McNamara