The Obama campaign recently rolled out a clever ad on its YouTube channel featuring Harold and Kumar co-stars Kal Penn and John Cho. Check it out:
In addition to it’s bold appeal to the stoner community (which is almost certain to irk the religious right), the ad promised a first in political convention history: a live web show engineered by the Obama campaign, hosted on its website, and led by the likeable Penn, who left his acting career to serve for over a year as Obama’s Associate Director of Public Engagement (before he returned to his acting career). The live web show will feature interviews and analysis, most likely from sources sympathetic to the Obama re-election campaign. In addition, all of the speeches from the DNC will be streamed live, as Obama has done with several of his speeches leading up to the convention.
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It’s all a smart plan from the Obama campaign that will redirect live stream viewers to subjective coverage of the DNC away from objective live streamers such as C-SPAN and ABC News (via YouTube), using a celebrity appeal to attract people who would otherwise tune in elsewhere.
One of the main rivals of the Obama campaign’s coverage could be the Huffington Post, who last week ran a “shadow convention” to coincide with the Republican version of the event. HuffPo has a reputation as for leaning to the left, so it will be interesting to see how they respond to what will surely be heavily one-sided coverage from the DNC. In particular, with a stoner icon leading the Democratic-sponsored programming, will HuffPo discuss the war on drugs with the same completeness that it exhibited during the RNC?
We’ll begin to learn the answer when the DNC starts today at 8 PM EST. Tune in.
