Desktop and web publishing are poor analogs, because neither do nearly as much for vanity as video.

Personally I find all three of these videos about equally repellent — but why is one of them (arguably the most sincere/least cynical one) rejected by its target audience community, while the other two are welcomed? Surely it can’t be anything as crass as production values? And/or endorsement by an authority?

Or here’s another hypothesis: peer pressure. If the initial Democrat response to Sing For Change had happened to be positive (eg ‘Aww, look at the cute kids singing their hearts out for the Change that their parents believe in’) would everyone have subsequently jumped the other way in their judgment here? (It shouldn’t be too hard to design a Milgram-type experiment to test this hypothesis.)

First, the right to vote, though more honored than used, is specifically reserved for adults. The political opinion of children doesn’t matter, by design. (Doubly so when they are (literally) rehearsed in the expression of those opinions.

Second, and probably more importantly, indoctrination only looks creepy to people who disagree with the doctrine. In a majority Christian nation, Christian indoctrination looks fine to a big chunk of the population. Politics, on the other hand, makes scrutiny by enemies inevitable, and that in turn makes even pro-Obama people able to see Sing for Change as a failed effort.

As a corollary, btw, amateur media had a very different effect in the primaries, where Obama Girl and will.i.am’s Yes We Can were introducing Obama in laudatory terms, but only to Democrats. It doesn’t matter what Republican think during the primary, so that kind of media is safer early on, when the ‘scrutiny by enemies’ effect is small.

Second, and probably more importantly, indoctrination only looks creepy to people who disagree with the doctrine.

I disagree, I think there are too many similar images in the collective memory that are negative that this video would creep out both political sides, not just those that oppose the doctrine they sing of. The basis for the video being creepy is it looks too much like (as the OP refered to) the Hitler Youth or a room full of school children singing “Happy Birthday” to foreign dictator (North Korea, Iraq, Lybia, etc.).

You can like a presidential candidate and still be creeped out by watching children being forced to sing about him/her… The only way it isn;t creepy is if the children decided to sing about their choice for president on their own volition, and here in America, we just don’t do that. The teacher that put the above tape together just shot her entire load of Warhol-guaranteed 15 minutes of fame on this creepy video…

And to restate your second point: you’re saying that Democrats (excluding the Obama-voting parents who were seen in the video cheering their children on) didn’t like the video not because they were appalled by it, but mainly because they recognized that it would be good ammunition in the hands of Republicans? OK, if so, then the problem seems to be one of execution, not content. That is, the video fails not because of the indoctrination, or the emotional manipulation, but because the producers failed to achieve the slick teflon finish of the disabled vet video for McCain — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4fe9GlWS8 — ie the real trick here is to make clips that are impossible to criticize without coming off as churlish toward either the vet or the kids.

Lordy, how depressing. There’s just no moral high ground here at all, is there? If they call economics the dismal science, then what does that make politics?