Obama delivers TV tour de force worthy of JFK
Baltimore Sun
October 30, 2008

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered a TV tour de force last night.

I don't think any presidential candidate has ever had as strong and wide-reaching a run on the medium as Obama did from the dinner hour to the midnight hour. As he shifted programming genres ranging from news to comedy, Obama altered his demeanor and calibrated his performances to the different settings with TV skills not seen since John F. Kennedy.

Obama's race across the television landscape started with informed and thoughtful responses to some tough questions from anchorman Charles Gibson on ABC World News at 6:30 p.m., and was still going strong as the clock approached midnight with live cable TV coverage of a speech in Florida where Obama was joined onstage by former President Bill Clinton. It was the first time these two men -- two of the most eloquent speakers in American politics -- stood side by side that way.

In between, was the highly publicized, prime-time infomercial that ran on three networks and four cable channels at 8 p.m., an effective and affecting production aimed at helping viewers get to know Obama better – even as it also personalized the nation's current hard times through the stories of four diverse American families.

And at 11 p.m., like a sweet after-dinner desert, came Obama's interview with comedian Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's The Daily Show. Obama struck just the right jocular and bemused tone with the acerbic comic – even though he was appearing via satellite, which can often make repartee all but impossible. Obama kept pace with Stewart quip for quip.

After watching every second of it, I stand by my column of yesterday: Obama is the last great TV candidate – the best since John F. Kennedy, better than Ronald Reagan.

Gibson, who was the first to grill and expose the limitations of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, was giving no free pass to Obama last night. While the conversation was cordial, some pointed questions were asked.

Obama's best moment was the way he dismissed charges from the McCain campaign labeling him a socialist and Marxist without sounding defensive by saying, "The notion I'm interested on punishing wealth or success is nonsense."

Here is a representative exchange:

GIBSON: And yet in recent months, you have hammered at the wealthy and CEOs and Wall Street and greed. Talked about taxing the wealthy to benefit lower- and middle-income people. Isn't that a kind of classic old-time class warfare?

OBAMA: No. You know, I'm reminded of my friend, Warren Buffett, whose support I'm very glad to have, who says if there's class warfare going on right now, my class is winning. (LAUGHS) Look, what I'm talking about here is going back to the Bush tax rates -- or the tax rates that existed under Bill Clinton back in the 1990s for people making more than $250,000 a year. That's not a punitive rate. We're talking about a marginal rate going from 36 to 39.

GIBSON: So what'd you mean when you told that plumber you wanted to spread the wealth?

 OBAMA: Well, if you look at the tape, what I said was exactly what I said right now, which is that if people are doing very well, then there's nothing wrong with us going back to these old tax rates in order to give tax relief to 95 percent of Americans who have been struggling even when the economy was growing. Now, that basic principle is as American as apple pie. You know, the irony of -- the biggest promoter of the early progressive income tax was John McCain's hero, Teddy Roosevelt.

As for the prime-time infomercial, its power came primarily from the wise use of imagery.

From an opening filmed image of an amber field of grain in Kansas, to a live closing shot of a wildly cheering crowd in Florida, Obama's 30-minute, prime-time campaign infomercial last night was a winner.

It wasn't that the production broke any new ground in media and politics. The producers essentially worked within the well-worn and time-tested genre of candidate films shown at national conventions. Think: Bill Clinton and The Man From Hope.

But last night's presentation was skillfully attuned to the candidate's strengths and perceived weaknesses – and spoke in a voice perfectly pitched to counter what the opposition, Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin, have been saying against Obama on the campaign trail.

His opponents have warned that Obama is an unknown quantity and somehow "different" than what they define as mainstream Americans. But in the film, he spoke movingly about being defined by the "absence" of his father, shaped by the death to cancer of his mother, and the love and hard work of his grandparents. And every scene included an American flag and an abundance of images from our shared national psyche like those fields of grain.

Furthermore, image after image showed Obama in the homes of voters talking to groups of people in close proximity. While diverse, each of the groups included large numbers of older white women and men, exactly the voters whom analysts say Obama needs to reach in battleground states. The intimacy of the home setting, along with the relaxed way in which the citizens and Obama shared that private space told viewers they had nothing to fear about this man.

In the end, though, perhaps nothing was more impressive in the infomercial than the vignettes of four diverse families struggling to make ends meet. Joe the Plumber felt like a phony, trumped-up sitcom character compared to these hard-working Americans whose stories of economic hardship the film deftly chronicled.

And then, came Stewart.

As serious and measured as Obama was in the news setting with Gibson, with Stewart, Obama was all smiles, high energy and witty banter.

When Stewart brought up the charges of socialism leveled by McCain and Palin, Obama replied, "The whole socialism argument doesn't really hold up. They find proof for it in the fact that in kindergarten I shared some toys with my friend… But I think being on your program is seen as further evidence of that tendency."

By the end of the conversation, the two were flat-out schmoozing, and you could not help but smile at how fast and funny the two minds were working despite the satellite technology between the one in New York and the other in Florida.

And still even as Stewart ended, a click of the remote to the 24/7 cable channels brought up the now oh-so-familiar image of Obama standing live on a stage surrounded by a sea of followers holding white and blue signs cheering and applauding.

He had shifted into another gear yet – a higher one – of elevated tone and soaring rhetoric. And it almost seemed as if the small screen would no longer be able to contain him.

(Top: AFP/Getty Images photo of a woman in Wheaton watching Barack Obama's campaign infomercial by Nicholas Kamm; Above: ABC News photo of Charles Gibson interviewing Obama in Indianapolis by Donna Svennevik )

Posted by David Zurawik on October 30, 2008 12:27 AM | Permalink

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