Today in South Dakota, Barack Obama responded to the remarks made recently by President Bush and John McCain. (For more on what was said, check out Simon's prior posts on the subject here and here.) Check out his response below:
While it clearly seems like Obama has learned how to respond to those who question his candidacy, it seems more evident that his being the subject of such egregious attacks - then responding strongly - actually helps unify the Democratic party, thus making his candidacy stronger. I mean, did anyone see how many people had Obama's back on this subject yesterday? Come on!
Today's score: Obama: 1. GOP: -5. As my leetspeaking friends might say, the GOP got pwned.
Moveon.org has just announced the winner of their Obama in 30 Seconds ad contest. It has been a very successful project with over 5.5 million votes cast and over 1,000 videos submitted. Peter Leyden discussed the contest earlier on our blog here.
Personally, I find the winning ad to be quite powerful. It strikes a nice bi-partisian tone while simulatenously packing in a multifaceted agrument that addresses many of Obama's perceived weaknesses. It features a white male (maybe working class?) who is a military vetern (national security) and at one moment appears with a flag flying in the background (patriotism). While not as creative as many of the other submissions, the ad is able to present a strong advocate that may appeal to a constituency that Obama has struggled with as of late. This ad certainly shows the wisdom of the crowd, and perhaps, the wisdom of Ben Affleck, one of many celebrity judges.
MSNBC reports that MoveOn.org will air the ad in Ohio, Wisconsin and Colorado spend around $200,000.
With record breaking fundraising comes record breaking spending. A recent NYTimes article cites CMAG figures showing that the Democratic candidates are spending more on TV advertising than in any previous primary, but given that none of these ads cast aspersions in the direction of the Republican nominee, this has led some to worry that McCain is getting a free ride.
After spending nearly $16 million in Pennsylvania, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have already passed the $100 million mark on television advertising in the states that have had primaries so far. The two Democrats' aggressive campaigns against each other have left little in the bank to mount an attack against Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.
Given that the Democratic candidates have maintained their focus on each other—at least when it comes to TV advertising—the DNC, Moveon.org and the SEIU are picking up the slack and have begun running TV spots critical of John McCain.
While McCain is on the bus peddling his newly unveiled healthcare plan, the SEIU has put together an ad featuring healthcare workers' take on the Republican Senator's proposal. (Hint: they don't think much of it.) The ad will air in Ohio and Washington, D.C.
In time for the five-year anniversary of Bush's famous "Mission Accomplished" pronouncement, which has come to symbolize how acutely Bush has misunderestimated the difficultly of waging a war in Iraq, Moveon.org has seized the opportunity to remind us of where McCain stands on Iraq with both a quotation from his "100 years" remark and a picture of his lovely Bush embrace. The ad will first be aired in Iowa and New Mexico. The SEIU reportedly plans to spend $1 million over the course of next month on ads critical of McCain.
Lastly, the DNC has been getting some media attention for the two ads it has launched in the past few weeks. Taking a similar tact as MoveOn.org, the DNC's most recent ad makes use of McCain's "100 years" response to a question about the length of the US troop presence in Iraq. The ad powerfully couples the McCain sound byte with disturbing imagery and facts from Iraq.
Note: For more on political TV advertising, check out the video from a recent event we did on this very topic.
The ad, slated to begin airing next week during 6 p.m. newscasts, begins with a fundraising pitch followed immediately by the narrated lines, "For twenty years Barack Obama sat in his pew listening to his pastor." Lest we have forgotten about Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the ten seconds of sermon that had brought down upon a Obama a little fire and brimstone, the ad quickly reminds us. We get a split screen with Reverend Wright on one side giving his sermon and a photo of Obama with his arm around the Reverend on the other—in case you didn't get it, they know eachother. The ad's stated purpose is to voice opposition to N.C. gubernatorial candidates Bev Perdue and Richard Moore. So how do you get from the Wright scandal to an attack on these two candidates? Well, they both endorsed Obama and according to the ad, Obama is, "Too extreme for North Carolina." Thus, drawing on the transitive property of "endorse", if Obama is too extreme for North Carolina, and Bev Perdue and Richard Moore endorsed Obama, then they must be too extreme for North Carolina. Q.E.D.
Based on 1,032 ratings on YouTube, this video has an average of two out of five stars. If that were a letter grade, it would be a solid F. Also, if you look at the RCP average of head-to-head polling pitting Obama against McCain in N.C., Obama holds a slight advantage. So if North Carolinians really think Obama is too extreme then, in their eyes, McCain is a fanatic.
Sidestepping the issue of whether he can stand the heat of the "Kitchen", Obama's response to Hillary's ad follows the campaign's usual parry to the the experience jab by highlighting his judgement and unifying quality. The reply seeks to shift the terms of debate from which candidate would be best in a crisis to which candidate can best bring about change.
And a quick side note, some in the media have disparagingly described Hillary's recent attacks as a "kitchen sink" strategy. Now, it's not a stretch to say that entitling an attack ad "Kitchen" seems to invoke that very characterization. Seems like a strange move on the part of the Clinton camp.
A deeper look at the Democrats' TV ad spending in Pennsylvania yields a significant validation of an argument NDN and the New Politics Institute have long been making.
As Gail Shister wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, candidates are beginning to increase their spending on cable advertising.
Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama together will spend close to $5 million on TV ads in the closing week before the state's Democratic presidential primary Tuesday.
Philadelphia stations will take in more than $2.5 million of that total, including $445,000 spent on cable - an impressive 17 percent. Cable's average for the five weeks running up to the primary is even more impressive: 22 percent.
Nationally, cable accounts for about 20 percent of political ads this election cycle, experts say, up sharply from the 2004 presidential campaign.
Then, candidates bought cable time "to an embarrassingly low extent," Gallagher says. "They didn't understand we were able to deliver such power for them."
A greater interest in cable isn't suprising given cable's ability to provide much more granular targeting than broadcast. In the same piece, Evan Tracy, a panelist for our upcoming April 24 Reimagine Video event, sums up this point nicely saying, "Cable sells by the pint. Broadcast sells by the gallon."
Turning to the content of the advertising, Hillary's latest ad is very much in keeping with the uniformly strident tone the campaign has been taking in the final days leading up to the Pennsylvania primary. Thematically in harmony with her now notorious 3 A.M. ad, "Kitchen" repackages the readiness question. It begins with the narrator describing being the US president as "the toughest job in the world" while we are shown images of past US crises. Our attention is then brought to the current slew of challenges facing our nation ending with, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Who do you think has what it takes?" Presumably the implication is that Hillary does have what it takes, turning on its head the demeaning sexist quip that Hillary should be relegated to the kitchen by inferring that yes, she should be in the kitchen, because it is a very hot kitchen and no one else can handle it.
Of course Hillary isn't the only one on the attack. In a break from the generally positive tone of the Obama camp's Pennsylvania ads thus far, "Afford", which began airing on Saturday, goes after Hillary's health care plan. The ad focuses on the same critique we have heard Obama lodge in debates, charging that people who can't afford health care will be penalized. (Another Obama ad, "Reason" also begin airing in Pennsylvania on Saturday.)
On the airwaves Clinton and Obama are engaged in a back-and-forth over his now infamous "bitter" remark. According to Evan Tracey, a speaker at an upcoming event of ours, Obama is outspending Hillary on TV ads by a factor of 5-to-1. Outside groups are joining the fray with the American Leadership Project airing a pro-Hillary ad on healthcare. There is simply an enormous amount of political activity on Pennsylvania televisions.
Here's a little glimpse into the latest TV ad sparring. First, in an ad called "Pocket", Hillary challenges Obama on his commitment to take on oil companies.
The Obama camp was quick to respond while being careful to stay close to his narrative of harkening a new kind of politics.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, "The Barack barrage has begun." The Obama camp began airing ads in Philadelphia on Friday, which will run through today, March 24th, the voter registration deadline. The Inquirer goes on to report that the Obama campaign spent around $330,000 on this latest slate of ads.
"Opportunity", a minute-long spot, is aptly titled and mostly autobiographical. Using the same words as appeared in his speech on race, Obama shines the spotlight on his grandparents, painting the picture of a working class couple; his grandfather served in the army, while his grandmother worked on bomber assembly line and neither had much money. The Obama campaign is no doubt attempting to appeal to the large number of working class voters in Pennsylvania, which have thus far been a key voting block for Hillary.
Obama is also running two 30-second ads, "Carry" and "Toughest." The former focuses primarily on Obama's ability to be bipartisian and features Illinois Republican Senator Kirk Dillard, while the latter promotes Obama's push for ethics reform.
As a little bonus, here are a couple of radio ads the Obama campaign has been running in Pennsylvania. Click here and here to listen.
I have yet to see reports that Hillary has started running ads in Pennsylvania, but as soon as she does I'll be sure to post them.
With the showdown primaries on March 4 over and the outcome of at least the Democratic contest still to be finally decided, it is a good time to point out what the 2008 primary campaigns have already made clear about the future of American politics. After this year, the four basic elements of any campaign-Messenger, Message, Media and Money-will never be the same. Those candidates who have adjusted all four of these dials and tuned them to Millennial Generation sensibilities and behaviors have been the most successful candidates in both party's primaries.
Millennials, those Americans born between 1982 and 2003, are the most diverse generation in American history. Forty percent of them are African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American or of some other mix of races and ethnicities. And twenty percent come from an immigrant family. A candidate like Barack Obama, whose bi-racial family and generational roots extend from slave owners in America to Kenyan goat herders and social workers in Indonesia, is not an oddity in their minds but has the model background for an American leader.
Eighty percent of Millennials have done some sort of community service in high school. . Eighty-five percent believe that directly contributing something to the community is an important way to improve it. When Senator Obama traces his experience to his days as a community organizer in Chicago, older generations tend to dismiss it as posturing and beside the point in gaining the experience required to government work. Millennials, by contrast, consider community service just the kind of experience they would like to to put on their resume when they apply for a job. Discounting its importance sounds to them like a dismissal of their own accomplishments. Indeed an examination of the biographies of many of the winning Democratic challengers in the 2006 Congressional elections shows this same penchant on the part of new voters to value a career of service over one spent learning the inner workings of the legislative process. It's also a reason why Senator McCain's service to his country in Vietnam and his stay in the Hanoi Hilton attracts rather than repels this new generation of voters, in spite of the attempts of a feminist icon of the 1960s to minimize the importance of that service.
Millennials have been taught since their parents first sat them down to watch Barney that the best way to approach problems is to find a solution that works for everyone in the group---since everyone is just as good and important as everyone else. The confrontational style of Baby Boomer candidates like Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney strikes them as rude, enough to earn them a time out until they learn how to play nice. By contrast, the unifying message of Barack Obama who suggests, somewhat naively to the ears of older voters, that his solution to the problems of America will be to get everyone around the table to work things out for the good of the country is exactly in tune with the way Millennials have been taught to solve problems. When John McCain distanced himself from Bill Cunningham's typical talk radio ideological rant, he earned the enmity of many of Cunningham's colleagues. But he spoke directly to Millennials who are looking for candidates who refuse to engage in that kind of name-calling.
But McCain, like all of the 2008 Republican presidential candidates (with the possible exception of Fred Thompson) , remained unable to embrace the social networking technologies that are the lifeblood of Millennials' daily lives. Having their children text friends sitting in the same car or "friending" people they barely know on MySpace are common Millennial behaviors that drive parents crazy. But the two most important possessions of any Millennial are their cell phone and their laptop, devices that allow them to stay connected to the Net 24/7. That type of peer-to-peer communication is the center of Barack Obama's media strategy. It has been the key to the organizational strength that Obama has demonstrated in caucuses across the country. Political pundits who still follow the news on the television news shows or in the newspapers don't see the enormous volume of personal communication being generated on MyBarackObama.com, built on the same operating system as FaceBook, until the electoral results once again seem to stun them on any given Tuesday night. Having ceded the lead in peer-to peer-media to the Democrats, especially Obama, rather than almost totally relying on older technologies, like talk radio and slick television commercials, the Republicans risk losing as badly in 2008 as they did to an earlier master of a new communication media, FDR, with his soothing radio voice, in 1932.
The same online engine that is generating all of the offline , grass roots enthusiasm for Obama is also raising money for his campaign in unprecedented ways and in unimaginable amounts. With one million of his friends on his website, Obama has now raised more money from more people than any candidate in American political history. Obama's use of this new media with appeals for small donations almost drove the Clinton campaign into bankruptcy and is likely to create a similar untenable disadvantage for John McCain in the general election. Ironically, it was McCain who first demonstrated the power of the Net to raise a lot of money fast in his aborted 2000 campaign. But that was long before broadband and social networks being accessed continuously all day long became the way of life for so many young voters. Now McCain and his party are forced to attempt to shame Obama into using public financing in the general election. That may be the only way they can avoid the kind of monetary deficits that Democrats and the federal government have experienced in the past.
The outcome of the Democratic contest, let alone the general election campaign is not pre-ordained. Events over the next eight months can cause public opinion to change direction. But the relative ease with which Barack Obama has woven a tightly knit strategy based on a new approach to what the profile of a Presidential candidate should look like; the fundamental appeal the candidate should make to the voters; the way that appeal should be communicated to all voters, but especially young ones; and the resources such an approach can bring to a campaign, makes his candidacy the most likely to succeed, with one possible exception. Hillary Clinton's success in most large states so far suggests that this new alignment of the four Ms of American politics has yet to be fully tested in campaigns requiring more complex organizational efforts over a longer period of time. In Silicon Valley terminology, it is not yet certain that this new configuration of the four Ms can "scale" to the size required to win a national campaign. Both the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania and the general election fight to come should provide the final test of this new approach to political campaigning and definitively establish a new formula for victory in the coming decades.
As we near the March 4th primaries, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are hoping to end their campaigns on a strong footing by hitting the airwaves. Aside from "Children", her now infamous ad that caused quite a stir, Senator Clinton is finishing strongly with "Partner" and "True", which is below:
Then there are Obama's ads. He responds to Senator Clinton's "Children" with "Ringing". Obama can afford deep saturation, airing "Safe", "Moving", and "Leader", which is below. Note: "Leader" is the first two-minute ad Obama has aired since Iowa. A lot of us wondered why he didn't air one in New Hampshire. Perhaps he learned his lesson, as some version of "Leader" will air in Texas and Ohio.
For more information on NDN's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election, click here.
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