By Michael A. Memoli, Tribune Washington Bureau –
WASHINGTON — In a campaign dominated so far by 30-second ads and debate sound bites, President Barack Obama’s re-election effort is taking a more expansive approach as it begins making its case to voters.
The Obama campaign on Thursday released a two-minute trailer in advance of a 17-minute video that advisers say will “put into perspective” the challenges that the president has faced and the difficult choices he has made in an effort to put the American economy back on track.
Narrated by actor Tom Hanks, it begins with this question: “How do we understand this president and his time in office? Do we look at the day’s headlines? Or do we remember what we, as a country, have been through?”
The trailer is the latest indication of how “We can’t wait” isn’t just the mantra at the White House, but also of his Chicago re-election headquarters.
Even as the Republican race for president slogs on, the Obama campaign is ramping up its efforts to frame the general-election choice that voters will face.
Vice President Joe Biden is set to take a lead role in that effort with a major speech next week that aims to contrast Obama’s course of action against the policies outlined by his political foes.
That speech, the first of four, is set for Ohio, a key general-election battleground state and the most hotly contested GOP Super Tuesday primary, which Mitt Romney narrowly won over Rick Santorum.
The full Obama video, called “The Road We’ve Traveled,” is to be released next Thursday and promises to tell a story “about determination and progress” told “by those who saw it happen.”
The campaign enlisted Davis Guggenheim, an Academy Award-winning director, to produce the documentary-style video. Guggenheim, whose credits include “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman,” was also behind a biographical feature of then-Sen. Obama that aired at the Democratic National Convention, and later a 30-minute TV special the campaign aired in prime time in the closing weeks of the 2008 race.
Last year Guggenheim had approached senior campaign adviser David Axelrod to offer his help again for the re-election, and the two conceived of the project together as a way to tell the story of Obama’s first term.
The campaign will be hosting “premieres” at its field offices across the country, mainly in the swing states key to the president’s re-election. It has already been screened at the campaign headquarters. To drum up interest in those events, the trailer is being sent to targeted lists of supporters, and Axelrod will also conduct a live question-and-answer session with supporters at those watch parties.
The trailer features testimonials from a range of administration officials — but the president himself is missing.
The economic crisis figures to be a major part of the video, but it’s also expected to offer insights into other major decisions the president made — to pursue health care reform, to bail out the auto industry and the military mission that killed Osama bin Laden.
The campaign is still employing the more traditional 30-second television advertisements in its arsenal. Obama for America and its ally, the Democratic National Committee, already are responsible for two of the top five most-aired campaign advertisements of the year, according to a new study from Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.
The White House endorsed the ideas in the trailer that promotes the film while taking care to distance itself from the campaign operation that generated it.
Asked at a briefing if the Hollywood video is an acknowledgement that the president’s everyday message isn’t getting through, White House press secretary Jay Carney replied, “Are you suggesting I’m not Tom Hanks?”
