The Obama campaign has released their post-debate ad into the wild, and it chock full of health care.
Oh, SNAP! Sort of. This stuff may be effective, but I'm not a huge fan of treating McCain's health care plan as if it's a simple tax increase. From a campaign perspective, that may well be the right decision. But it's not building a mandate or a public consensus in favor of Obama's plan. This week, however, the campaign finally released an ad meant to do exactly that:
It's not bad. And the framing is smart, if slightly frustrating. Obama is selling his health care plan as an exercise in triangulation. Which, if they were willing to really emphasize that messaging, could actually be a very savvy strategy to differentiate their reform effort from all that came before. We'll have to see if they hold the line. Meanwhile, E-mailers tell me this ad is actually being aired around a fair bit of the country, so it sounds like they're serious about it. Even so, I'm not convinced they've quite found the point of contrast that makes their plan look good, even urgent, while making McCain's plan look insufficient. Rather, they've found points of contrast that make McCain's plan look insufficient, and imply that their plan doesn't require any new money, which isn't true and could cause them problems down the road.
