OFA To Air Grassroots Ad Contest Winner Starting Monday
The compelling and emotional ad featuring children worried about getting sick and dying — the spot that won the ad contest created by Obama’s political operation — will begin airing nationally next week, I’m told.
Organizing for America will air the ad on national cable and in D.C. beginning Monday, in an effort to up the moral and emotional urgency of the health care debate with the message that the lives of an untold number of individual children hang in the balance:
The ad contest, and the decision to air the winner with donations to OFA, are meant to contrast the grass-roots support for reform with the big-money interests bankrolling expensive ads against the proposal, keeping Obama’s list engaged and excited at a time of rising engagement by the GOP base.
“The winning video shows that our supporters’ creativity and passion is more than a match for the slick ads and partisan spin doctors on the other side,” Obama adviser David Plouffe wrote in an email announcing the winner early this week.
“There are eight million uninsured children in America — we all deserve health care,” the little girls say in the ad. With disagreements among Congressional Dems still unresolved, leaving the fate of reform uncertain, the spot is an effort to raise the stakes of failure and to keep people focused on the big picture, the urgent need to succeed.
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Both sides hate it when their opponents start arguing causes from the perspective of, “But think of the children!”
I don’t doubt for a moment that there will be lots of gnashing of teeth about this ad.
I don’t mind a “think of the children” when it’s stating a current reality. What I had a problem with was some of the Repub ads that came out insinuatiing that children and elderly wouuld be harmed IF Obama was elected, or health care reform passes, etc.
Greg, Plouffe already e-mailed me this ad y’day.
“the spot is an effort to raise the stakes of failure and to keep people focused on the big picture, the urgent need to succeed.”
Agreed. Doubly. (Happy now ?)
Wouldn’t both the House and Senate bills leave millions – including children – uninsured? We should have elected Hillary…
Of the over 44,000 Americans who die each year from lack of health insurance, many ARE children.
Why do right wingers hate American children?
Good news from TPM: The Wyden amendment will get a vote on the senate floor (assuming cloture on starting debate is a success).
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/with-reids-support-wyden-and-baucus-to-cosponsor-free-choice-amendment.php
Comments eating genie is at again, Greg. We are back to where we were about a month ago.
“Wouldn’t both the House and Senate bills leave millions – including children – uninsured? We should” try to elect more progressives to defeat the right wing’s anti-child attempt to kill life-saving progressive legislation.
Democrats are shameless and their policies a threat to everyone including children.
Right wingers are blocking life-saving legislation to line their pockets with corporate profits.
Over 44,000 Americans die each year because right wingers chose corporate-profits over American lives.
Democrats are shameless and their policies a threat to everyone including children.
Yes, Head Start was such an awful disaster…………..
It’s much better to send children from poor families to school hungry.
They learn less that way.
Actually, this commercial was very real to me. Especially, with the comment about breaking the leg/arm and losing the house. My son broke his arm this summer and needed day surgery on it. My husband and I are trying to figure out how to pay for it. The payment plans the hospital and clinic offer only go out for six months or they tell you about a ‘medical’ credit card that you can use to pay for it. Yeah, whatever.
And we have medical insurance.
“Democrats are shameless and their policies a threat to everyone including children.”
It’s not merely a curiosity that someone might voice a statement this counter-factual and yet believe it so. It is, in this case, a moral outrage.
The US is 33rd in infant mortality rates, behind even Cuba. The list of nations which rate higher, often much higher, than America in keeping its children healthy and living have health and insurance programs of precisely the sort which the conservative movement and the Republican Party and their corporate allies now strive to oppose. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate
This ad is excellent. It describes, symbolically, the actual truth of the state of affairs in the US and appropriately places the focus of the deep immorality of that situation where it belongs – onto those whose blind ideology and/or personal financial interests trump any real concern for America’s children.
Bernie knows better than to spout that misleading statistic about infant mortality rates in the US without the appropriate caveats.
Right wing torture advocate “sbj” has repeatedly made false statements including the whopper that 2,130,000 is the same as 1,920,000 (which is beyond absurd).
There are dozens of countries with lower infant mortality rates than US.
There are also dozens of countries with longer LIFE SPANS than US.
And those countries achieve those superior health outcomes at a fraction of the cost as the US.
Oh, and in nearly every industrialized country around the world there are ZERO bankruptcies due to health costs.
Medical bankruptcies in the US are rampant and many of the Americans that go bankrupt because of health care costs HAD INSURANCE.