Colorado is a swing state which means we’re going to be seeing a lot of political ads between now and November. Two that just hit the web, and the airwaves, feature our presidential hopefuls breaking out into song. Both are attack ads, which means the ad for Obama features Romney’s singing and the ad for Romney features the crooning of the President.
Here’s the Obama ad for your viewing, and listening, enjoyment…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud3mMj0AZZk]
I wanted to include the Romney ad, featuring Obama singing Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together, but a copyright claim by BMG Music resulted in the clip being pulled from YouTube. According to the Washington Post,
Romney’s campaign plans to fight the decision. “Our use was 100 percent proper, under fair use, and we plan to defend ourselves,” a spokesperson said. Other videos featuring the same clip of Obama remain on YouTube. (It’s not clear why the company has not challenged those videos.)
Now no one would seriously claim that vocal ability is a prerequisite for the highest office in the land, but the like-ability of the candidate is an important component and these ads may strike a chord with the electorate.
July 29 Update: According to Variety magazine, the Romney campaign came back with a new version of their ad featuring the singing of President Obama. You can see it on the Romney website.
This ad really caught my eye, because we don’t realize how commericials and other media outlets influence our thoughts for the 2012 election. For example, the other day I was listening to Pandora and all of a sudden another presidential election commercial appeared and I became really frustrated just because I hear enough of that on TV, and now I have to listen to them when I want to go on Pandora. We are such a media driven society, whether it is facebook, youtube, or TV that it is hard to escape the political ads that are bombarding the various media outlets. Overall, I believe that the ad was trying to grap the publics attention by using musicality in the same way people are obsessed with American Idol and the Vioce.
I found this post to be rather interesting. I actually wasn’t aware that this had actually happened. But it reminded me of how we talked about how mass media is used to sway people’s thoughts and ideas of someone and the presidential campaign ads are one that does such a thing. You can use youtube all tv networks pretty much any media outlet to get out what people should think of a certain candidate.