Five days ago, when the American Stories half hour TV ad was due to be aired at 8 p.m., I planned my entire night around being in front of the TV to see it.
But somehow, a phone call from an old friend came and we were still in deep discussion an hour or so later and I forgot about the ad until I sat down around 9 p.m., and then a feeling of dread came over me as I surfed the channels looking for it, hoping I hadn't missed it, but indeed I had.
Trying to understand the sadness I felt, I hunted online at the different networks, thinking it might be on the website for MSNBC or CNN or others. I couldn't find it. I checked youtube, but didn't see it there. I checked barackobama.com, and there it was, and I watched it online, relieved and captivated, and suddenly all was right with the world, even if I could only view it in a 3"x4" window.
But here's the fascinating thing: after I watched it on the campaign's website, I went again to youtube and searched American Stories, rather than 'half hour Obama ad' or variations, which all brought up the wrong videos. And it popped up, with 202 viewers, this must have been around 9:30. And I watched it again. Two days later, I was telling a friend to watch it, and when I pulled it up on youtube, there had been around 745,000 viewers. Today, the number of viewers is 1,651,992, and counting.
And that just makes me ridiculously happy, because there's no way to view that infomercial and take away anything but goodness and optimism, and a deep respect for Barack Obama.
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