Sorry, Phillies fans, this week Obama proved he's more popular with America than Philly's baseball team.

His infomercial before the final game of the World Series attracted more viewers than the game itself.

Much to the surprise of television executives:

“I was shocked by the number Obama was able to draw,” said Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. “It’s just a stunning number.”

As the New York Times reported, "Obama’s 30-minute commercial, which played on seven networks, broadcast and cable, was seen by 33.55 million viewers, according to figures released by Nielsen Media Research. On the three broadcast networks that carried the special, the audience totaled more than 25 million, easily surpassing the number for the last World Series game on Fox, which averaged 19.8 million viewers."

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By 2012 all campaigning may be done by video. Evidence? Here's a video communication from Obama to his supporters warning them of overconfidence.

Keep an eye on the guy on the bike.

The polls in Pennsylvania are showing no consistent trend - other than an Obama advantage - despite the intensive attention being paid to voters by McCain and Palin.

For the past week, Obama has held a lead marked by its fluctuation from 4 percent to 14 percent. One piece of evidence that may indicate some gains by McCain is that the latest poll, by NBC/Mason Dixon and in the field on Oct. 27 and Oct. 28, gives Obama the 4 point lead.

But a Marist poll, done the 26th and 27th gives Obama a 14 point lead.

Those fluctuations explain why McCain has hope, and Obama is releasing videos like the one above. The average of all recent polls gives Obama a 9.5 percent lead.

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We're here to serve. If you managed to miss Barack Obama's infomercial last night - and I'm guessing Philadelphia was not one of the more attentive media markets - the reviews praised the production quality, noted the message was about feeling, not facts, and marveled at the last few minutes, when the show went live to a rally in Florida.

Tom Shales at the Washington Post called it "ObamaVision." The video opens with shots, we kid you not, of waving fields of grain and rolling plains. Music? Think Aaron Copeland. Here's Shales:

"Somehow both poetic and practical, spiritual and sensible, the paid political broadcast, which aired on seven major cable and broadcast networks (on Univision, it was identified as "Historias Americanas"), was a montage of montages, a series of seamlessly blended segments interweaving the stories of embattled Americans with visions of their deliverer, Guess Who....

...The film conveyed feelings, not facts -- specifically, a simulation of how it would feel to live in an America with Barack Obama in the White House. The tone and texture recalled the "morning in America" campaign film made on behalf of Ronald Reagan, a work designed to give the audience a sense of security and satisfaction; things are going to be all right."

John Baer at the DN said the ubiquitous nature of the television buy was...creepy:

"It was `HEY, AMERICA, YOU CAN'T NOT LOOK AT ME! I COMMAND IT!'

And this barrage includes Obama interviews granted to NBC anchor Brian Williams, ABC anchor Charlie Gibson, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Comedy Central's Jon Stewart of  `The Daily Show.'

Isn't there some overkill here? "

And this from the NYT, displaying the sort of scepticism that McCain campaign says its coverage too often lacks:

"Because Mr. Obama is already running the most intensive and wide-ranging presidential advertising campaign in history, with electronic billboards for his candidacy showing up even in home video games, it raised the obvious question, “How much is too much?” With a heavy-handed style of filmmaking devised to pull at heart strings as Mr. Obama ticked through the commercial’s hard-luck stories, it risked seeming manipulative.

(Senator John McCain’s campaign wasted no time in issuing a statement that read: “As anyone who has bought anything from an infomercial knows, the sales-job is always better than the product. Buyer beware.”) "

All that said, if you're an Obama fan, you'll like it. If not, not so much. But at this point the video is aimed at reassuring Democratic leaners.

Here it is:

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Only this time, instead of pitching beer, they've revived their famous greeting in service to Barack Obama.

In the two-minute short, "Wassup 2008," the crew can barely summon up the enthusiasm to say "wassup!"

They're all in pain from the terrible mess this country is in. The only thing that can coax a half-hearted smile from any of them is the sight of a TV ad for Obama.

The spot has become a viral sensation, generating more than 2.6 million hits on YouTube since it was uploaded on Friday. (See it at below, or click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq8Uc5BFogE.)

Charles Stone III directed and appears in the video as well as the original commercials. He's the one who delivers the new tagline: "Change, that's wassup. Change."

"It's trippy," says Stone. "It's gotten over 7,000 responses. You get a couple of people writing 'Yeah! Obama rocks!' Then you get people delivering major discourses on the Republican ideology versus the Democratic ideology."

The video piggybacks on the Budweiser commercial that swept the nation after airing during the Super Bowl in 2000.

"When advertising transcends the format and becomes an everyday slogan, that's the Holy Grail for an advertising campaign," says David Allan, assistant professor of marketing at St. Joseph's University. "There was a time when people even in the Midwest were saying it to each other."

By the way, there is no official way to spell "wassup," according to Stone, a Wynnefield native and the son of former Philadelphia Daily News columnist Chuck Stone.

"There's a lot of ways to do it," he says on the phone from Los Angeles, where he now lives. "Most people know it as 'Whassup!' I've seen it as 'wassup' or 'wasssup.' Personally I think of it as 'Whassaah!' "

Stone should know. He developed the bit for a film short, "True," in 1998.

"True" was spotted by a Chicago ad executive who brought it to the beermaker. The company offered Stone, an emerging filmmaker whose credits now include Drumline and Mr. 3000, $37,000 to license the concept for five years. He accepted on the condition that he direct the commercial.

"When I was putting it together, I knew it could slip into urban jive and I didn't want that to happen," says Stone. "Even then no one knew what it would do: Four young black men screaming 'wassup' into the phone."

It featured local guys, most of whom are back for the subtly polemical sequel: Scott Brook and Fred Thomas from West Philadelphia, and Paul Willams from West Oak Lane. Even the new addition in the Obama video, Maurice Smith, is from Philly.

After the commercial blew up, Stone was suprised that Budweiser didn't try to renegotiate. "You would have figured they would try to buy me out because of the spot's huge success," he says. " 'We need to own this thing.' " The agreement expired in 2005.

"It's very unusual for an advertiser not to keep the rights to creative," says Allan. "I'm very suprised [Stone] was able to hold onto the concept and use it again."

At this point, Stone is feeling pretty happy with the deal he struck.

"A lot of my friends are like, 'Dude, you got gypped. $37,000 compared to to the amount of money Budweiser has reaped off it?,' " he says. "Yeah, that's true, but here's the hook: I am reaping the benefits of the benefits they reaped off my short film.

"I was able to create a short film, a poignant piece of work that will motivate people to embrace the change Barack Obama represents. That's worth a million dollars to me."

Wassup, indeed.

The Obama campaign may be loaded. But it’s the Libertarian presidential campaign that’s armed to the teeth.

This morning, the Bob Barr campaign announced that anyone making a $2,300 campaign contribution to the longshot contender before midnight (tonight) would receive an unusual thank-you gift: “a new, in the box, hard to find, 12 gauge Mossberg Model 590A pump shotgun.” It’s worth $500.

But wait, there’s more.

Barr -- a former Republican congressman who once led the impeachment charge against Bill Clinton -- will personally autograph each weapon.

According to Barr’s website every contribution “equips this campaign with the ammunition we need to fight to protect your gun rights.” 

Barr has been a vocal critic of the McCain-Feingold Act, the law regulating campaign contributions, calling it an abridgement of 1st Amendment rights.

An FEC spokesman says that's fine -- the value of the gun is an in-kind contribution from whoever provides it (and $500 is well within the contribution limit) and its fine for the campaign to give it to a donor so long as the campaign is getting significant benefit from the process (i.e. that it isn't using campaign funds for the personal benefit of someone else.)

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Just in case Philadelphia union electricians need something to listen to on the exercise treadmill, their union, Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, has them covered.

As part of its support for Barack Obama, the union said it has shipped out nearly 5,000 MP3 players — complete with ear buds — to its entire membership.

The hour-long audio commentary includes speeches by John Doughtery, Local 98’s business manager; Patrick Gillespie, head of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council and Patrick Eiding, president of the Central Philadelphia AFL-CIO Labor Council.

In addition to that stirring line-up, listeners can hear comments by area politicians and excerpts from Senator Obama’s acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention.

The union says that part of the goal of the MP3 strategy is to overcome the concerns of any of the union’s white members who remain leery of voting for a black man.

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Maybe the horrendous mix of economic, war and budget crises certain to confront the next president won't be quite so inevitable. That's the warm thought from Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist who majors in foreign affairs and minors in everything else:

"Have you seen the reports that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is suffering from exhaustion? It’s probably because he is not sleeping at night. I know why. Watching oil prices fall from $147 a barrel to $57 is not like counting sheep. It’s the kind of thing that gives an Iranian autocrat bad dreams.

After all, it was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me."

A collapsing Iran would solve a huge foreign policy problem in one fell swoop, and even if the mullahs remain in charge of some sort of fundamentalist state, an Obama presidency would pose propaganda problems:

"Barack Hussein Obama would present another challenge for Iran’s mullahs. Their whole rationale for being is that they are resisting a hegemonic American power that wants to keep everyone down. Suddenly, next week, Iranians may look up and see that the country their leaders call “The Great Satan” has just elected “a guy whose middle name is the central figure in Shiite Islam — Hussein — and whose last name — Obama — when transliterated into Farsi, means ‘He is with us,’ ” said Sadjadpour."

But is Friedman just another LEM (liberal elite media) type getting ahead of the vote?

Maybe. The accuracy of polling rests not just on the questions asked but the presumptions behind the calculations of the pollster, the Washington Post points out:

"Some in the McCain camp also argue that the polls showing the largest leads for Obama mistakenly assume that turnout among young voters and African Americans will be disproportionately high. The campaign is banking on a good turnout among GOP partisans, whom McCain officials say they are working hard to attract to the polls... 

 'I have been wondering for weeks' whether the polls are accurately gauging the state of the race, said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota. Borrowing from lingo popularized by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Schier asked what are the 'unknown unknowns' about polling this year: For instance, is the sizable cohort of people who don't respond to pollsters more Republican-leaning this year, perhaps because they don't want to admit to a pollster that they are not supporting the 'voguish' Obama?

If so, that could mean the polls are routinely understating McCain's support. 'I have no evidence that this is happening,' Schier said, but he added: 'I'm still thinking there's a 25 percent chance that this is a squeaker race and McCain pulls it out.' 

If he does pull  it out, maybe McCain's next gambit may be to have Palin open negotiations with Terhan. Think of the photo op!
 

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