Chrysler's Super Bowl halftime ad—"It's halftime in America"—is generating political buzz on two fronts.
Politico is not alone in asking if the ad was pro-Obama. After all, he did make Chrysler's resurgence possible, and election year is, we hope, halftime for the president. Chrysler naturally denies a pro-Obama message; the company's CEO says "The message is sufficiently universal and neutral that it should be appealing to everybody in this country and I sincerely hope that it doesn’t get utilized as political fodder in a debate."
But that doesn't mean Obama's team can't cheer it on in a universal kind of way:
"Powerful spot," David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Obama's re-election team, said on Twitter. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer also on Twitter said: "Saving the America Auto Industry: Something Eminem and Clint Eastwood can agree on."
Meanwhile, John Nichols points out that one of the ways Chrysler made the ad "universal" was to edit out the content of union signs in Wisconsin protest footage in the ad:
Wisniewski’s original video, from an evening rally at the King Street entrance to the Wisconsin Capitol, features images (at the two-minute, seventeen-second mark) of signs raised by members of Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI), the local education union that played a pivotal role in the protests. One sign features the MTI logo, another reads: “Care About Educators Like They Care for Your Child.”
In the Chrysler ad, the MTI logo is missing and the “Care About Educators…” sign is replaced with one featuring an image of an alarm clock. Several other union signs are simply whited out.
Given that the images are played as Clint Eastwood's narration talks about "the fog, division, discord, and blame that made it hard to see what lies ahead," though, I'm not sure that's the first problem I'd have with the use of the images.
