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Like Meghan, I too loved the aesthetic of the infomercial. It had all of the Horatio Alger glory of an NBC Olympic-hopeful hagiography, spliced with the better cinematography of great Hollywood. You know in those movies the good guys always win, and yet I cry every time. Beyond family values, Obama underscored again what's been his hallmark since 2004: unity. That Boston speech never fails to move me. It's about refusing to use the politics of division to win. McCain, to his discredit and to his detriment, has never picked up on the yearning the vast majority of this country has to be more alike than different, more unified in a goal toward betterment. I'm a little sappier these days, but I think that I'm not alone in that sentiment. It's why Obama's appeal in the infomercial to all our immigrant roots works. Bill Richardson mentions it toward the end of the segment—the importance, and uniqueness, of Obama's efforts toward unity: racial, political, economic, historic. The other night on Hardball, a McCain flack pooh-poohed the idea of unity as a "platitude." But I don't think it is. Sure, he hammers on it a lot, but Obama's efforts to sew this country together—and his genuine intellectual curiosity (as opposed to what scares me most about Palin, to go back to Meghan's earlier post: her Bush style lack of curiosity and what appears to be a disinterest in seeing beyond the world she currently lives in), has always made him the most attractive of candidates.
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Meghan, that's an inspired allusion. You're totally right about the aesthetics of the Obama infomercial—and there was even the football practice scene. No wonder I, like you, was drawn in; I'm a huge Friday Night Lights fan. Did you notice, as I did, what a notable contrast in content there was, though? One central theme of the Obama ad was cohesive families doing their best for their kids. That's exactly what is so glaringly not in evidence on FNL, as Sara Mosle noted in her great piece about the show: Coach Taylor and his wife, Tami, with their high-achieving daughter, are the anomalies in Dillon, Texas. I've been struck lately by how often I've heard Obama sound the note of parental responsibility, a theme he's stuck with very consistently, and is—I think—great at pushing, not stuffily but urgently. The government is here to help in various ways, but you've got to turn off the TV set and help the kids with their homework: that's the message. (Only tonight, of course, he was hoping the tube was on.)
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Just watched the Obama infomercial. The folksy veneer verged at times on seeming condescending (c.f. the knotted pine in the office, etc.), and the language was pretty plain: Obama mosty offered up boilerplate about his positions. But visually it was great. Davis Guggenheim, the director, used a lot of moody atmospheric shots intercut with footage of "average" Americans struggling to make ends meet. Guggenheim's father was Robert F. Kennedy's campaign documentarian. But surely Guggenheim had also taken a page or two out of Peter Berg's book. To me, the most striking thing about the ad was this: All the Friday Night Lights echoes. The handheld camera, the long shots from the inside of a car, swiveling forward through the passing landscape—which were that show's hallmark. And the music at times sounded like Explosions in the Sky, the band that did the soundtrack for the movie and TV version of Friday Night Lights. It makes sense: Friday Night Lights captures a particular blend of optimism and gritty realism that I think is what Obama is after. But I'm a sucker for this aesthetic; I wonder what others made of it.
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