Barack America

This new Obama ad is a cutdown of the biographical intro played at the DNC convention, voiced by David Strathairn. It's a wonder why you would do a bio spot at this late date, but it really frames how the Illinois Senator's life and values intersect. He tells a little story about remembering how he went with his grandfather to watch astronauts return to Earth near Hawaii after a splashdown, holding and waving a little American flag. He discusses how in his family, being an American meant being industrious, working hard and playing by the rules, respecting elders and fellow citizens, and recognizing how we are all in this together.

For too long, Democrats have discounted the importance of storytelling, of making an emotional argument to rival the argument based on issues and ideas. My first memory is a Fourth of July parade in Philadelphia during the Bicentennial. I was three years old and I just remembered the spectacle of it, the marching bands and the sparklers and yes, the little flags. When I was 7 years old, I ran a straw poll in my elementary school (Carter beat Reagan, but I date myself). My dad bought our family's first house, we moved in when I was 2, and he was fired two weeks later. These moments of reflection, hardship, civic participation, they shape worldviews.

It is embedded into the human condition to want to feel pride in your identity, be it your ethnicity or your country or whatever. We have given away American identity for too long to the right, but in fact Barack Obama is more representative of what America is in the 21st century than John McCain, and indeed, the liberal conception of values, of equal opportunity and equal rights and the value of work over wealth, is far closer to the original conception from the founding of the nation, I would argue. But you can't just expect people to intuit that. You have to make the case. And this does it in a very grounded, accessible way.

It's a very good piece.