Hillary Clinton’s final Pennsylvania ad features images of FDR and JFK together with allusions to the 1929 stock market crash, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, JFK’s July 1961 call for 217,000 soldiers to meet the “world-wide” Soviet threat, the Carter-era gas lines, Osama bin Laden, Hurricane Katrina and a home foreclosure. I don’t know how the Clinton campaign missed the Dust Bowl and the plague of locusts. The ad invokes Harry Truman’s adage: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” The New York Post describes the ad as “Bama-geddon.”
FOX News reports on the Obama campaign’s response. The Obama campaign has not only deployed in the rapid response mode of the 1992 Clinton war room, it has deployed Bill Clinton. The ad features Bill Clinton speaking during a 2004 campaign rally:
Now, one of Clintons Laws of Politics is this: If one candidates trying to scare you and the other ones trying to get you to think, if one candidates appealing to your fears and the other ones appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.
Obama’s ad to the contrary notwithstanding, Clinton’s ad does indeed make me think and hope. It makes me think that as president we need an older gentleman who has survived tough times and is going to get angry about our current challenges. And it makes me hope that John McCain will beat Obama.
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