New McCain Ad

Ann Althouse comments:

I think this is a brilliant ad. It seems to be speeding into the future, with flashy visuals that remind me a little of the last episode of "6 Feet Under," when Claire drives off into the desert toward her future and the whole future of all the characters unfolds. But we aren't shown things that will happen in the future, even as futuristic music seems to tantalize us and make us a little anxious about things to come. We see images from the past (intercut with views of the galaxy). Images of Churchill and Roosevelt seem to embody a mystical sense of tradition. Even though I was trying to look at this ad with a critical eye, I kept getting chills. At one point — TR looking out onto a crowd — I thought: This is the feeling of being conservative — it is a deep emotional sense that the past matters and flows into the present and makes sense out of the future.

Time is the expressed theme of the commercial: The first words we see are "The Time Has Come." We know the candidate is old — to me, it's a big problem — but the commercial makes the long stretch of time seem profound and important. Because McCain is old, he is anchored in the past, there, where he is a young man. We see him looking dashing, but also suffering as a POW. In the voice over, he is saying that he felt that he owed more to his country than his country owed him. We hear him say that there was never a day when he was not proud of his country, and, as used in the ad, this must be heard as an allusion to Michelle Obama's statement that for the first time in her life she is really proud of her country.