Barack Obama American Stories Recap

Full video of Barack Obama's half-hour commercial/mini-documentary broadcast on Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 8pm on BET, CBS, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, Univision, and TV One.

Commentary from former Clinton Aide, Howard Wolfson:

Let's quickly dispense with the silly spin from the McCain campaign and the notion that Senator Obama's infomercial might somehow be overkill or extravagant--there isn't a campaign anywhere that wouldn't want to be able to afford thirty minutes of network time a week before the election to make a final pitch to undecided voters.

And this ad was clearly aimed at those voters still deciding--it effectively interspersed geographically and ethnically diverse tales of middle class hardship, narrated sympathetically by Barack Obama, with specific policy details about how an Obama Administration would address the problems confronting American families. [...]

This ad won't win Senator Obama the election--he was going to win in any case. But it was a highly effective, well-produced and well-executed closing argument. And at a time when the McCain campaign is doing everything it can to knock Senator Obama off his game, it's another example of how and why that task is so difficult.