3 AM Girl Is An Obama Girl Now

Nothing blunts the effect of a political ad quite like one of its stars supporting your opponent. It turns out the little girl in Hillary Clinton's "3 am" ad is all growed-up now and supporting Barack Obama. From Veracifier:

Like deep-fried Oreos, this is delicious, but is it good for you? Do you care? And did you all catch the irony of the girl's name, vis a vis The Political Machine? Let's kick this around real quick.
Of all the nonsense that gets covered in election campaigns, this is my favorite kind, the kind that force the media to pull back the curtain on the absurdity of their part in the process. The story is irresistible, yet it shows not only the artifice of political campaigns, but the bankruptcy of ideas that is modern political coverage.

The ad asks you to form an emotional connection to that sleeping child, but that child is acting in a piece of stock footage from Getty Images. She didn't know if she was supposed to be safe from terrorists, or burglars, or wearing a bedwetting alarm, or acting out a "before" scenario for "The Clapper." In fact, when that footage was shot, there wasn't yet an Iraq war to make judgments about.

Now, as a news story, you're supposed to connect with the young woman, Casey Knowles, (no relation, I presume, to our own David Knowles, a favorite of Clintonites everywhere) as she has grown into a supporter of Barack Obama who will be of voting age in April, plenty of time to make her bit of difference. Before I watched the video, I thought, "Who cares? It didn't matter what she thought before, why would it now?"

The thing is, she does connect in a way that sleeping ambiguously through some stock footage does not. In the admittedly brief clip, she comes off as smart and gracious. What red-blooded American isn't proud to see a 17 year-old girl who is a caucus precinct captain and didn't say, "like, y'know" even once during the interview?

The fact that she's an Obama supporter is mostly dumb luck, but he does do well with young voters, and he could probably get a lot of mileage out of a counter-ad with a smart, attractive young voter like Casey. He should probably give her tax returns a once-over first, but after that, it's a no-brainer.

This shouldn't hurt Hillary to much, as Casey is from one of those states that don't matter, and Hillary had no control over this. You can't be expected to vet all actors in stock footage. Now, if the little boy and the Mom turn out to be Obama suppoerters, that's a different story. I've already got my "Obama Wins 3 am Ad Caucus" story ready.

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