Adwatch: Obama emphasizes family, values in new ad
By The Associated Press – 1 hour ago
TITLE: "Country I Love"
LENGTH: 60 seconds
AIRING: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia
SCRIPT: Barack Obama: "I'm Barack Obama. America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life's been blessed by both.
"I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn't have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbor as you'd like to be treated. It's what guided me as I worked my way up — taking jobs and loans to make it through college.
"It's what led me to pass up Wall Street jobs and go to Chicago instead, helping neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed. That's why I passed laws moving people from welfare to work, cut taxes for working families and extended health care for wounded troops who'd been neglected.
"I approved this message because I'll never forget those values, and if I have the honor of taking the oath of office as president, it will be with a deep and abiding faith in the country I love."
KEY IMAGES: Opens with Obama speaking directly to viewers, a flag pin on his lapel. Photographs from different stages of Obama's life flash onto the screen. One shows Obama, who is seeking to be the first black president, as a child in his white mother's arms. In another, Obama as a young man sits on a bench between his white grandparents. Photographs from later in life show him as a college student, leaning nonchalantly against a pillar and clutching a book. In another, he is a community organizer in a shirt and tie addressing a meeting. Images of a series of houses in a working-class neighborhood stream by. Other images show him on the campaign trail, including sitting with people around a table, speaking to a soldier and chatting with a senior citizen.
ANALYSIS: Obama seeks to introduce himself to voters — and address some of his political vulnerabilities — as he opens his general election advertising campaign.
In images, the son of a white Kansas mother and a black Kenyan father tries to remind voters of his mixed-race; no pictures of his father are shown and Obama doesn't mention him.
Obama, in both words and pictures, emphasizes his modest, middle-class upbringing. It's both an effort to counter the notion that the Harvard-educated, Chicago resident is an elitist and an attempt to connect with working-class voters who largely preferred rival Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries.
Throughout the ad, Obama emphasizes his love of country, and wears a flag on his lapel as he seeks to reassure voters about his commitment to the country and counter questions about his patriotism.
By focusing on family and core values, Obama is trying to show voters of all stripes — Democrats, independents, and Republicans — that they have much in common. These issues transcend political preferences and Obama is seeking to win over independents and some Republicans unhappy with eight years of Republican rule.
The campaign chose to run the ad in traditional battleground states as well as some that have reliably voted for Republican presidential candidates in the past several elections, including Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Montana, and North Dakota. The intention is to test Obama's theory that his appeal allows him to make Democrats competitive in states that the party typically ignores and, thus, give Democrats better chances to rack up the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.
It is also possible that Obama is simply on the air in these states to see whether he can move poll numbers. If so, he likely would choose to stay on the air to compete in the state. At the very least, Obama can force McCain, who lags in fundraising, to spend money in states Republicans long viewed as safe.
Analysis by Joan Lowy and Liz Sidoti.
On the Net:
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