woohoo! i just saw my first presidential ad of the year. it was for barack, on the news in denver.
(and being colorado, it had the irony of being followed immediately by an ad for The Tanner Gun show, famous for being the event where the Columbine killers purchased three of the four guns they used to kill all those kids. how nice. the commercial was appalling. lots of close-up shots of tables strewn with high-powered rifles as submachine guns, and then these displays of knives with curving twelve-inch blades (also very similar to the knives the Columbine killers carried into the attack, but did not use.)
well, it is colorado.
meanwhile . . .
my friend in LA said TV commercials have just ramped up in the last 24 hours there, mostly the caroline one for barack. i found it on youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVlnL1_xXJM
wow. i was not quite expecting that. they are not kidding around with the comparison to JFK. good call.
i always roll my eyes when people try to stretch to make those connections (eg, when bill clinton first ran, and endlessly milked the photo of him shaking hands with JFK when bill was a teen. big deal: bill wanted to be the next Kennedy. the connection felt manufactured to me.
but this time, caroline really endorsed barack at the right moment: after that sense of 1960 and 1968 had so clearly returned. months after even barack's rightwing enemies began to acknowledge it, and after the iowa and south caroline victories started to make the dream feel real.
it reminded me of what frank rich said about brokeback in his new york times column about a week after its release, when the film was the talk of the nation. i don't have the exact quote, but i believe it was something like: This film is having such an impact at this moment, because it is ratifying a movement, rather than leading it.
i thought he got that exactly right. there are pioneers, who prep the rock-hard soil, and that is really hard work, and vital. for gay rights that included the stonewall drag queens, and maybe the ACT Up people and all sorts of pioneers. in the media, it included The Real World and Ellen and Will and Grace. we are well past that stage, now. the ground had been ready, but someone or something had to come along and really take advantage of that. Brokeback was that moment.
i think in their own way, hillary and barack are kind of those people, too. people martin luther king and susan b anthony feel like their predecessors, who broke the ground and made today's road possible. and many others, of course. (also gloria steinem, and Betty Friedan on the women's side). these two today are poised to be ratifiers: the country is finally ready for a woman or a black as president--not necessarily eager, or asking for one, but ready, if the moment presents itself. a person of great strength had to come along and make it so.
i do believe that we have two people of great strength today, with very different talents, one of whom will make it so. we will finally have either a woman president, or an african american.
hmmmmmmm. i drifted astray there.
one idea that i was grasping for was that by luck or design, caroline got the timing of her announcement perfect.
if she had done it a month earlier, it would not have worked the same. the obama movement was already rising--very powerfully in some circles--but most of the country, which ignores politics until the moment is almost at hand--had not yet felt it themselves.
most people had not yet felt anything like 1960 or 1968, so if they heard caroline's commercial and saw those images a month ago, they would have felt she was trying to make that connection for them. it would have felt like a bit of a reach.
now i think so many people have felt it--or at least heard about it from people they know--that when she says it overtly, and the commercial shows the images of her dad . . . it ratifies a feeling they already had. it takes an existing hazy connection inside the viewer and transports them directly there: it is 1960 again, we had a leader the country rallied behind. this is how it feels to unite. this is how we can feel again. this is how we will feel, if we make this really happen.
i get tingly when i watch it. i've had my hopes dashed before, and i'm a little afraid to dream again. but i want to.
Dutton (Penguin) in early 2009. 
