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A New Obama Cinema?

 

A lone lean figure strides purposefully through a dark tunnel, maybe a highway underpass. There’s no fear. A familiar husky voice whispers that “it’s half time—both teams are in their locker rooms, discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.” One needn’t be a genius like Karl Rove to catch the drift of the two-minute Clint Eastwood-narrated Chrysler spot shown mid-Super Bowl last Sunday and everywhere else ever since. But get it Rove did.

First thing Monday morning, America’s preeminent propagandist was on Fox & Friends to whine that “the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.” What he meant was that a grateful automobile industry was engaging in some sneaky subliminal payback, hiring no less than Clint Eastwood as the mouthpiece for Barack Obama’s reelection bid. Well before the Giants edged out the Patriots, Obama adviser David Axelrod had wiped his boss’s fingerprints off the spot. “Powerful spot,” he slyly tweeted to his followers. “Did Clint shoot that, or just narrate it?”

By Monday evening, Eastwood—a life-long Republican—had given a statement to Fox’s O’Reilly Factor, “I am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama.” (Note the use of “mister”—Eastwood may be a secret Ron Paul supporter but, as a good American, he’s bound to give the president props.) Eastwood was actually a critic of the automobile bailout, having told the Los Angeles Times last November that “we shouldn’t be bailing out the banks and car companies.” By Wednesday, Chrysler executives were uniformly declaring that the ad had no political agenda: “It was designed to deliver emotions,” the company’s chief marketing officer was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, “and I don’t think emotions have a party.” (He did not, however, complain about extra publicity generated by the controversy.)

In its casting, content and positioning (little more than an hour after Obama told a pre-Super Bowl interviewer that he deserved a second term because of his successful economic policies, in the midst of the most widely watched telecast in American history), “It’s Halftime in America” was a most effective bit of political theater—maybe the best of its kind since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America.” Like that ad, “Halftime” is a dense yet leisurely montage. All over America, in country hamlets and on Manhattan island, people are waking and up and going to work, thoughtfully, resolutely. An urban dweller rolls out of bed; a guy with a marked resemblance to Dennis Haysbert (the president in 24) ponders the bathroom mirror and knots his tie: “It’s halftime in America too. People are out of work and they’re hurting—wondering what they going to do to make a comeback. And we’re all scared because this isn’t a game.” Are these two guys going out to look for jobs?

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