The final pitch

IN Opinion | 30/10/2008

IDIOTBOX

Sevanti Ninan

When you are blowing a million dollars per network per insertion on an infomercial five days before an election for president, your target is the undecided voter. And Barack Obama, clever man that he is, doesn¿t intend to blow it. His half hour ad which surfaced in the US on Wednesday night, longer than an average TV programme, is titled ¿American Stories, American Solutions.¿ It is carefully pitched at middle class, white America. It is billed as the most costly single piece of political advertising in US history. There is the odd black family among those American stories, and an endorsement from the odd black or Hispanic governor, but this isn¿t about reassuring minorities or the underclass. Middle America, which could just develop cold feet about a black president, is where it is at.  

He covers all bases and repeats the promises and strategies that Americans and all of us other saps hooked on the American presidential race have heard a million times over. Tax cuts, tax credits, energy saving incentives, health care, rescue plans. By now even household pets in the US will be able to regurgitate all of that backwards.  This is not the time to introduce new ideas, His campaign evidently thinks it is the time to hammer the old talking points home. And harp on the fears, anxieties and hopes of  a population that has had it better than anybody else in the world and has just got a rude shock. Hard times figure, poverty doesn¿t. And John McCain? He doesn¿t figure either.

As campaign messages go it is more slick that striking or moving. Being slick means you don¿t say vote for me, or mention John McCain or his Alaskan baggage. You don¿t waste time attacking. You tell prospective voters that this election is not about Democrats and Republicans, it is about the American people and their future. A future that is carefully and reassuringly material. You will have a job, a nice home, an education for your child, healthcare for the single mothers, the sick, the retired. My mother died of cancer, I know about illness. I had a father for one month of my life. I know about single parents. My little girls are important to me. I know about parental dreams.

These days you don¿t talk about the American Dream, you only hint at recapturing it. There is no vision stuff here, beleagured America cannot talk about leading the world. It is focused on its own bailout. So it is time to allay American fears.  

This is a carefully optimistic  infomercial. Will it swing the undecided? With McCain still sounding desperate and negative, it might. As for the rest of us, we¿ve been given a new definition of economic hardship, American style. A fridge shelf per child for junk food, with the understanding that its got to last all week.

And funnily enough, though there are endorsements from half a dozen governors, the CEO of Google, a couple of Senators, and a retired brigadier general, there is none from the Clintons. Colin Powell doesn¿t figure either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtREqAmLsoA