Selling VirtuePandering ad campaigns from Chevron, Starbucks, Liberty Mutual, and Barack Obama.

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Obviously, the greatest beneficiary of this promotion is Starbucks. Harnessing its customers' altruism for the price of a cup of brewed coffee—one of the cheapest items on the menu, I should add—the company burnishes its calculated lifestyle image by defining volunteerism as part of the Starbucks gestalt. We may be making billions from selling you a luxury item, but we're a good company, and you're a good person, the promotion says.

More reasons to be suspicious of the Starbuck initiative: Both Oprah Winfrey and Jon Bon Jovi saluted it on her show.

The screwiest of the do-good campaigns is "The Responsibility Project" from the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. It probably won't ring a bell unless you've seen its TV commercials, in which viewers are implored to do the right thing for a stranger (picking up a shard of broken glass at a fairground, yanking a fellow pedestrian out of the path of an oncoming car, etc.). For more of this easy treacle, I encourage you to view the "Films" section of the company's Web site for vignettes about a slacker who suddenly grows up, a broken chair's odyssey in an office, and the crisis averted at a lighthouse.

The films don't stink. What stinks is Liberty Mutual's exploitation of our goodness. What I want from my insurance company is low premiums and good service, but that's not what Liberty Mutual wants to sell me. It wants me to believe that "Liberty Mutual is all about doing the right thing," to crib from the project's Web site, which also brags that its executives serve on boards (Boston Ballet, Bentley College, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Red Cross, and others) and that the company funds a golf tournament, and underwrites the Fourth of July celebration in Boston, and sponsors a firefighter award, and gives to a PBS history program, and more and more.

That's wonderful, but all those good works hardly distinguish Liberty Mutual from hundreds of other companies, or dozens of other insurers who are as much into responsibility as Liberty Mutual. What insurance company isn't? The more responsible people are, the fewer claims that will be filed and paid out. At Liberty Mutual, responsibility is just code for "let's make more money."

Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. has already parlayed Obama's inaugural speech, laden as it was with references to "responsibility," into a Web site film. I found Obama's speech as irksome as any corporate homily because he, too, can't bring himself to specifics when talking about a "new era of responsibility."

Like some Madison Avenue pitchman, there Obama was on the steps of the Capitol, yapping platitudes about "duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly." Did he hint at the particulars? If this president thing doesn't work out, he and his speechwriting team should consider advertising.

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Obama said, "The time has come to set aside childish things." Or was it Liberty Mutual? Which childish things does he want us to set aside? It will take a SWAT team to remove the rubber duck of my youth from my premises. What childish things of yours does Obama want you to set aside? Send your answers to . (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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