Woa, hello Obama-Osama mix up

I'm at work, so I didn't actually watch those videos and really don't know what you're talking about here.  Nevertheless, I suspect and sincerely hope that the "Obama" in the second sentence of your second paragraph is supposed to be "Osama."

Oh please.  Bin Laden was flashed for half a second among a whole list of "threats" and "crises."  Could you be a little more hystrionic?    

"You need to be ready for anything. Especially now, with two wars, oil prices spiking, and an economy in crisis."

But after showing us the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Kennedy confronting the Soviets, Nixon-era gas lines, the Berlin Wall, and so forth, oil prices and a recession sound like small beans. "Especially now?" Makes no sense. This is really a McCain ad, in that it leaves the strong impression that things today aren't nearly as bad as they could be.

Anyway, this ad makes me say thank heavens we didn't choose the untested neophyte in 1992 over the experienced, ready, accomplished incumbent. Oh, wait ...

It would probably be a good idea to not mix up the names Obama and Osama; I'm not questioning your journalistic integrity; but your attention to detail is a worry.

There's nothing wrong with showing bin Laden in the ad, of course (I guess we should all be glad they didn't morph Obama's face into Osama's - that's probably next). But it's not a very good ad overall, for the reasons Rhubarbs states. Also, about halfway through the narrator's tone picks up and he almost sounds cheery.

And what is up with this "can't stand the heat" line the HRC campaign has adopted the last few days? It's an interesting strategy for a candidate who spent weeks on end whining about alleged unfair media coverage.

The Obama campaign's response:

When Senator Clinton voted with President Bush to authorize the war in Iraq, she made a tragically bad decision that diverted our military from the terrorists who attacked us, and allowed Osama bin Laden to escape and regenerate his terrorist network. It's ironic that she would borrow the President's tactics in her own campaign and invoke bin Laden to score political points. We already have a President who plays the politics of fear, and we don't need another.

Only on The Stump's keyboard are the "b" and "s" keys found next to each other

I'm surprised and disappointed that someone from TNR didn't fix the Osama/Obama mix-up in the original post.  Can someone please quicckly do that?  

I didn't find the ad objectionable.  Pretty generic for a presidential ad, to be honest.

Alan, I agree that there's nothing "objectionable" in the ad. It's still a crap ad, though. You don't start with the Great Depression, move on to Pearl Harbor, and then say that we need a "ready" president "especially now." Say what you will about the housing crisis and the Iraq war, they look like a delicious fudge sundae compared to the Great Depression and WWII. And while we're thinking through the claims made in the ad, in 1932 FDR had all of five years in state-level elected office on his resume, while Herbert Hoover might have been the most successful and accomplished American public figure between Reconstruction and WWII. Hillary's ad is simply nonsense, and it's not very well produced to boot. If you showed a high-school video production class the 50 most cliched political ads of the last generation, then told them to make a Hillary ad in that style, this might be what they'd come up with.

A political ad doesn't have to be offensive to be crap -- as Hillary's lazy, sloppy Osama ad shows.

...exactly what people think of her. Which is why, when asked by her own canvassers--according to a story

I don't think I've ever seen a political ad that wasn't lame, boring, derivative, predictable. The really effective ones are incredibly simplistic and just repeat OtherSide's gaffes-- the Michigan Senatorial candidate who was taped speaking to Toyota execs in Japan in pidgin English, "I. know. this. be.cause. I. own. a. Toy.o.ta..."