Race to Washington

Barack TV

You may have seen the Barack Obama infomercial that aired here on Wednesday night. If not it is well worth checking out.

As I watched the opening frames I was immediately reminded on Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America advert from the 1984 campaign.

Obama clearly starts out trying to grab the mantle of Reagan-esque optimism but he also taps into the tremendous doubt that defines this election.

The stories he chooses reflect that prevailing insecurity about the strength of the American dream. I thought the example of Larry and Juanita Stuart in Sardinia, Ohio, was particularly effective.

The most telling line of all came from a struggling Ford worker from Kentucky called
Mark, who said ‘We are going to lose America as we once known it.’

In that one line is the story of this election: an historic clash between America’s innate faith in the perfectibility of their lives and the crippling doubt about the future of their shared civic dream.

The fascinating thing is how Obama seems to channel the crisis of confidence which shapes the public mood through his own life-story

Talking about his father, he says, he was ‘shaped more by his absence than his presence’.

The infomercial was compelling in parts, reassuring in the way it presented Obama (as a man you could imagine being president.). But I thought there were flaws exposed here as well.

There is still something detached, formulaic, about the way Obama interacts with people. He comes across as perhaps a little too anxious to turn the problems of the real-people he meets into parables.

For more on the US Election go to RTE.ie/uselection

Posted at 04:00PM Nov 01, 2008