New Obama campaign video: what it may say about his reelection strategy

[falling_cookie]

The Tom Hanks-narrated video, as judged from the just-released trailer, sheds light on the Obama campaign's likely themes. Among them, that voters should take the long view.

By Peter Grier

President Obama’s reelection campaign released a two-minute trailer Thursday for “The Road We’ve Traveled,” an upcoming short film about the Obama presidency. If

Comments

[screamingintune]

I gotta say, on a purely superficial spectator level, I am interested to see how the Obama '12 campaign goes. Criticize him all you want, but he and his team are brilliant campaigners. Considering how the most well-organized of the GOP candidates, Mitt Romney, is stumbling and failing hard, it'll be interesting to see if Romney's camp can step up to the plate. I think the inability to be a calculated and shrewd campaign that is good at vetting and stopping leaks really sank the McCain campaign.

And with the Republicans kind of devouring each other in the primaries, it could go either way. The experience for Team Romney could be an excellent learning experience, or he could just continue to stumble. I will say that it doesn't seem like Romney has learned all that much since his '08 run, he's just benefited this time around a very weak field of opponents that include people who quote Pokemon and other assorted crackpots. And even against a terribly weak field, Mittens is still just squeaking it out. I have no doubt he'll get the nomination, but it shouldn't be this fucking difficult for him. It's not really comparable to compare this primary battle to Hillary vs. Barack '08, because in that case you had two very shrewd candidates with excellent organization and nearly identical platforms. Romney and his opponents have much more contrast than Clinton/Obama in '08 and yet the decision still seems very difficult. I think for a lot of people voting in the '08 Democratic primary the choice between Obama or Clinton was hard for people because they were so wildly similar. I ended up voting Obama over Clinton just because I thought he was more electable, but unlike Romney voters, I wasn't holding my nose in disgust and thinking about how much I didn't like the rest of Obama.

Anywho. The Obama campaign is very good at what it does. Campaigning is perhaps what the Obama team does better than anything. So, fuckery aside, I think we're probably about to witness another master class in how to run a Presidential campaign. Should be interesting to see how the Super PACs on both side change the dynamic.

[hinoema]

I want to see if they address the fact that Republicans have abandoned political discourse in favor of religious persecution. (That's persecution for the Church, not of it.)

[carmy_w]

I don't think they'll go there, but I do expect them to really push women's rights.
Of course, the people that choose to vote for ANY of the Repub. candidates based on their religious beliefs will NEVER vote for that evil muslim who's desecrating the white house, so....

[intrikate88]

I totally agree. I would love to have some sort of internship or assistant job with all of this, just for the sake of getting such a quality experience of marketing and branding and storytelling. I think it'd be really educational.

[eyetosky]

Honestly, even the most shallow observations about candidate's campaign strategy and team always held a lot of weight to me. I remember last election, even just their websites told me volumes.

Last election, I think I went off in the comments once (almost four years ago, lol HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN HERE?) about how it little things like the fact that Obama and Biden's photos on the site looked like they were actually part of the same photoshoot (unified lighting, angle, color treatment), and how all the information that a potential voter might was to find was instantly accessible spoke volumes about the attention, training, and planning put forth by his team.

Comparatively, McCain's site looked... well, it looked like a local news channel. Palin's face was shopped in from a headshot in her standard press kit, right into a banner ad. The whole site might well have been done in tables, and you couldn't find a damn thing on it. His team was told to put a site up, and when they had, they went "whelp, job well done" without asking themselves what the site was really for.

Obama is clearly not a graphic designer or a programmer, but the fact that his website was one of the most amazing I had ever seen for a politician told me that even on topics he knew nothing about, he knows how to find a team of experts that will get the job done. So when he's not an economist, or a school teacher, he can surround himself with a team that DOES know where to find the information or skills. A campaign for me is like a practice cabinet with a marketing focus, so seeing who a campaign chooses, and what they're instructed to do, is always fascinating to me.

Also, I found out a sizeable portion McCain's staff was comprised of the very same people that Bush used to trash him. Vile stuff, like using his adopted daughter to seed rumors of an illegitimate affair, things like that, and that election left him a different man. Everyone here on the community had observed that something was really weird and wrong about the new McCain that he was presenting to the world, and I always wondered if it was because he hired a staff of people he didn't even like, who didn't like him, or even both, to tell him what to do. He wasn't acting like himself, it seemed, but I can make the leap that he wanted to win so badly that he essentially sold his soul over to the people that would beat him before, because... hey, they won, right?

In a very broad sense, I always got the impression that Obama was running his campaign, and he just had a good team to organize and implement that direction, whereas McCain's campaign was running him.

[mirhanda]

he and his team are brilliant campaigners.

Ah, but now we do know that he'll throw us under a bus to make sure the insurance company executives get to keep on screwing us all over, so I don't know how much people will believe him now. I know I take every word that comes out of his mouth with a grain of salt now, because I really believed him before. Now I know that at the end of every promise there is an implied "as long as it doesn't hurt rich folks."