Obama Releases 2 minute Ad
Obama has released a 2 minute ad addressing the Economy.
Did you see it whole? Congratulations, you have an attention-span that is above average.
Two things stand out to me in this ad.
1. Obama did not mention John McCain once, not even to contrast their plans for the economy. Of course, it’s fairly obvious what he’s thinking of when he says “petty attacks and distractions” (oops sorry, excuse me while I renew my lipstick), but he mostly lays out a very abbreviated version of his own plan.
2. What commenting I’ve seen on the blogosphere has exactly nothing to do with the content of the ad itself. Mostly it has to do with whether it’s too much of a “risk” to subject voters to a whole two minutes of information.
It’s this last thing that stands out to me the most, because I found myself not being sure about the answer, and that in itself is absurd. The dumbing down of the voter has been taken to such an absurd degree that this ad, which in a normal universe would be considered the “fluff” is arguably too wonkish and long for the seemingly non-existent attention span of your average voter.
There is something deeply wrong with us if we cannot be sure that our citizens are willing and able to spend a whole 2 minutes listening to a guy talking about the economy without changing the channel. Regardless of whether you agree with the content of the ad, I personally am very happy Obama challenged viewers to pay attention as adults and wish McCain would air similar ads, with both abandoning the 30 second mind-candy. At the same time I find it tragic that this is considered “challenging”.
If he’d actually used the two minutes to present information, it would have been a lot better. Only about 30 seconds of it seemed to discuss his policy plans though- the rest was boilerplate "I feel your pain" and "We need real change" stuff.
I’m with C Stanley that the intro and finish were long. They probably could have gotten away with even a little longer than a minute.
The fact is that yes, Americans do have short attention spans. One of the first things I learned about television is that you don’t want to be on one shot for two long, unless the subject is doing something.
Still, I suppose better this than 30 second spots that don’t have time to say anything of use. McCain should do one, too.
Michael,
Honestly, if someone’s giving strong oratory in a speech, or giving an dryly spoken, but informative presentation, people will watch. When I watch this I see Obama droning at me, and I ask myself why I want to watch it.
I agree with C Stanley, that if he jumped right into his policy proposals it wouldn’t be boring. Instead we get a short sanctimonious lecture about why he’s telling us his policy proposals.
I don’t know. Seems pretty useless to me Claudia. He’s just giving a speech, mentioning some things without getting into specifics… and that’s it.
Not sure what this is supposed to mean really. Is it an attempt to convince people to vote for him? I think not. Is it an attempt to get people to read his plan? I think it is. But is this how you should convince people to read your ‘economic plan’?
Weak attempt, he doesn’t give valuable information… boring like hell… not just in presentation, but in what he’s saying - it’s much of nothing really. I just wasted 2 minutes of my life on this.
The more I think about it, the more this reminds me of a kid in middle school who has to write a 5 page term paper and fills in with fluff. It’s almost like the whole point of Obama going to this 2 minute format was to ridicule those with "short attention spans" who don’t want to pay attention to the longer ad, but when you really do pay attention there’s nothing there.
Every second air time for this ad has to be paid with millions. Because of his colour Obama has to do everything much better then everybody else. That is why we have the privilege this year to see the best, most expensive, longest, most interesting and so on and so on campaign in the history of the US. Obama is growing with every challange he is facing. That is hard for him but good for us.
Just a lot of fluff from Obama. Nowhere does his mention one of his executive officers was one of the Lehman executives who ran that company into the ground. No did he mention another one of his advisors was the head of Freddie Mac and took 90 million from that company, prior to running it to the ground but also gave Obama $84,000 in campaign contributions. In fact, since 1989, considering all contributions from Freddie Mac, Obama came in second to all U.S. Senators and Congressional members, only behind Chris Dodd (despite only spending 20 months total working in the Senate)
Absolutely amazing that Obama would point his fingers at Republicans, especially in a Democrat dominated house. More Obama lies, more Bill Burton lies. The American people are too smart to believe the garbage.