Obama campaign will make its case in video
The 17-minute ad due next week will be aired in swing states across the country.
In a campaign dominated so far by 30-second ads and debate sound bites, President Obama’s reelection effort is taking a more expansive approach as it begins making its case to voters.
The Obama campaign on Thursday released a twominute trailer in advance of a 17-minute video that advisors say will “put into perspective” the challenges that the president has faced and the difficult choices he has made in an effort to put the American economy back on track.
Narrated by actor Tom Hanks, it begins with this question: “How do we understand this president and his time in office? Do we look at the day’s headlines? Or do we remember what we, as a country, have been through?”
The trailer is the latest indication of how “We can’t wait” isn’t just the mantra at the White House, but also of Obama’s Chicago reelection headquarters.
As the Republican race for president slogs on, the Obama campaign is ramping up its efforts to frame the general election choice that voters will face.
Vice President Joe Biden is set to take a lead role in that effort with a major speech next week that aims to contrast Obama’s course of action against the policies outlined by his political foes.
That speech, the first of four, is set for Ohio, a key general election battleground state and the most hotly contested GOP Super Tuesday primary, which Mitt Romney narrowly won over Rick Santorum.
The full Obama video, called “The Road We’ve Traveled,” is to be released Thursday and promises to tell a story “about determination and progress” told “by those who saw it happen.”
The campaign enlisted Davis Guggenheim, an Academy Award-winning director, for the documentarystyle video. Guggenheim, whose credits include “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman,” was also behind a biographical feature of then-sen. Obama that aired at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and a 30-minute TV special the campaign aired in prime time in the closing weeks of the campaign.
Last year, Guggenheim approached senior campaign advisor David Axelrod to offer his help for the reelection effort, and the two conceived of the project together as a way to tell the story of Obama’s time in office.
The campaign will be hosting “premieres” at its field offices across the country, mainly in the swing states key to the president’s reelection. It’s already been screened at the campaign headquarters.
To drum up interest in those events, the trailer is being sent to targeted lists of supporters, and Axelrod will conduct a live question-andanswer session with supporters at those viewing parties.
The trailer features testimonials from a range of administration officials — but the president himself is missing.
The video is expected to focus largely on the economic crisis, but it’s also likely to offer insights into other major decisions Obama made — to pursue healthcare reform, to bail out the auto industry, and the military mission that killed Osama bin Laden.
The campaign is still employing the more traditional 30-second television advertisements in its arsenal. Obama for America and its ally, the Democratic National Committee, already are responsible for two of the top five most-aired campaign ads of the year, according to a new study from Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.
The White House endorsed the ideas in the trailer that promotes the film while taking care to distance itself from the campaign operation that generated it.
Asked at a news briefing whether the Hollywood video was an acknowledgment that the president’s everyday message wasn’t getting through, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney replied, “Are you suggesting I’m not Tom Hanks?” michael.memoli @latimes.com Christi Parsons and Kim Geiger in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.