Obama campaign hires Boing Boing Video collaborator for campaign meme video

Nice to see some recognition from high places for Joe Sabia, the talented director who also collaborates with Boing Boing Video on our in-flight Virgin America television channel. Here's the first of his videos for the Barack Obama 2012 campaign. In Joe's signature style, it's an ADD-friendly cavalcade of presidential memes. The Story of Us: Five Years Ago Today.

Of course, the president himself is a fan of Boing Boing, as he mentioned in a 2011 speech: "Most days I barely skim through the comment section of Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Firedoglake, The Daily Dish, BoingBoing.net."

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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koko szanel

yay lets show some love to the drone killer
- Mister44
  
  “Arrggghh – killing bad! Obama bad! Arrrgglleeee.”
  
  Wait – did I just defend Obama? REPENT SINNERS THE END IS NEAR!!!
  - peaceloveunderstanding
    
    make fun, sure, the murder of innocents across the globe really is quite laughable dont you think?
    - Mister44
      
      If you are referring to Anwar al-Awlaki, he was many things, but innocent was not one of them.
Quiche de Resistance

Quite a moving video. I can’t decide which was my favorite part, when he legalized indefinite detention of american citizens, or when he announced biden as running mate.
- http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin
  
  I’m with you, but christ, the GOP alternatives are exponentially more horrible. I am so depressed about the 2012 elections.
  - davidasposted
    
    Agreed. One of these cycles American voters are going to have to get off the carnival ride and see the world in a different way. ‘Cause right now, we’re just spinning around, and around, and around.
  - Quiche de Resistance
    
    Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I am so depressed about the 2012 elections.
    
    I believe that they may all kill and eat each other, so — problem solved.
  - Mister44
    
    What – you don’t want to choose between a shit sandwich and a giant douche? Some people are so picky ;o)
Bersl

I yearn for the day when the President of the United States gets knee-deep in an Internet flamewar.

Not that it will ever happen. But if it ever did, it would be lulz.
EH

I’m glad it’s titled “The Story of Us,” so that I can know it has nothing to do with me.
ZikZak

Nicely produced, but man, what an embarrassing video to watch. And I didn’t even vote for him! All those people totally blissed out on hopechange. I wonder how they feel now?
- http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair
  
  Pretty goddamned sheepish, just speaking for myself
- Layne
  
  Nah, some of them are still banging on the drum pretty loudly. It’s just completely impossible to figure out WHY.
  
  But I have almost the same reaction when the GOP revs up a campaign to nominate absurd potential candidates that are no better than Francis the Talking Mule, and the GOP faithful absolutely *swoon* over them.
  
  Me? I’m voting for the 600-lb Butter Cow Sculpture!
  http://www.theonion.com/articles/600pound-butter-cow-sculpture-wins-iowa-caucus,26941/
  - EH
    
    Roseanne Barr made the Presidential primary ballot for California, so that’s where I’m starting my decision process.
http://twitter.com/strugglngwriter strugglngwriter

Nicely done video. Very cool.

Watching all that campaign footage just makes me sad, though, for what could have been.

Cthulhu in ’12 – Don’t settle for the lesser evil
- EH
  
  They had to use all that campaign footage because that’s the last time he went out of his way for us.
  - millie fink
    
    Exactly.
    
    I’m pretty tempted to just opt out of the Evil of Two Lessers this time.
greebo

Gotta admit, he’s just so damn likeable.
But.
The US isn’t going to get a leader who can actually accomplish useful stuff until its citizens finally rise up and free their government from the iron grip of money and special influence.
Don’t blame Obama, blame yourselves. What have *you* done to help bring about change?
- peaceloveunderstanding
  
  Don’t blame Obama, just re-elect him and expect more of the same. He is NOT likeable, unless of course instead of paying attention to his political policies we get swept up in his pop culture appeal.
peaceloveunderstanding

Sweet, we Boing Boing readers love war, bank bailouts, indefinite detention, Guantanamo, endless support for the military industrial complex!!!!!!!!! :p
Eric Cashew Harding

Man, you all deserve a old, white Republican for another 8 years. Be thankful
- clpolk
  
  But I don’t, dammit. What is wrong with these people?
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1131654742 Justin Brown

I liked the events that are shown in the video. There are many more, not shown in the video, that I disagree with.
Compared to Bush, that is very positive. Compared to a theoretical President McCain, it is very positive.

What have I done to bring about change? I’ve worked with a local coalition of third parties that are trying to get the hold of the two party system loosened. Specifically focusing on the state sponsored primary ballot system that favors 2 parties. Get rid of it, have the Democrats and Republicans select their candidates on their own dime and their own time.

Next up is going to be asking candidates to give their best answer for science questions. I have a dream of getting a million people signing a science pledge (similar to but more honest than the anti-tax pledge) saying that if a candidate won’t answer a science based questionnaire, then none of the signatories will vote for a candidate. Hopefully a million would be enough to get their attention.
- ocker3
  
  Hey Justin, another Justin here, and I approve of this message. A Science Pledge would be an excellent idea, I really hope it gains traction.
MarkMark

I think the alternative would have been worse. These are just highlights. I’m sure the GOP could hire someone to do a video of the lows. I would still vote for him especially when I look at the GOP candidates.
bcsizemo

If our next president doesn’t manage to get the debt to 20 trillion by 2016 I’m going to be very disappointed…
http://twitter.com/zhasu Zhasu

As in any other promotional video, authors try to focus on positive things, so from that perspective the video is a success.
I must say I do like Obama, he is probably the most charismatic leader in the world today. He didn’t deliver on some or many promises, but which president did? Blaming him for the economic troubles in US is about the same as giving him the credit for killing Osama Bin Laden. He inherited the problem and dealt with it to best of his abilities, and he did a fairly decent job. On a domestic front the economy is doing better, at least in terms of unemployment numbers. On foreign front, we have one less war to fight.
What we should ask from Obama is to change policies on internet use, personal freedoms, Gitmo and torture, etc. That’s where he failed the most.
- ocker3
  
  I’m going to niggle you about “Blaming him for the economic troubles in US is about the same as giving him the credit for killing Osama Bin Laden.”
  
  That’s not the same. One is a negative, one is arguably a positive (in a global context). He turned the economy around, and he put back together the team that was chasing Bin Laden (which Bush took apart). It’s not like he screwed up the economy and had Bin Laden taken out, he Fixed the economy and took Bin Laden out.
  - http://twitter.com/librtee Sasha@librtee
    
    He didn’t ‘fix the economy’. He didn’t even turn it around. The economy is still a wreck.
    
    The decline in unemployment comes from people dropping out of the labor force, not out of jobs being created.
    
    http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/02/09/real-unemployment-number/
    
    “according to the BLS, the civilian labor force was 153.8 million in January 2008 and 153.2 million in January 2011 — a decline of 600,000 while the population increased by some 6 million.”
    
    The deficit financed stimulus – money borrowed from our children and grandchildren – did absolutely nothing to ‘fix’ the economy. It didn’t even succeed in keeping employment stable.
    
    Obama is Wall Street and the Big Bank’s man, not the American people’s man. Look at the recent bank ‘settlement,’ where the administration let the worst banks pay off the damage of their criminal actions for pennies on the dollar, with no jail time.
    
    Obama took a bad situation and made it worse.
    
    I guess I’d vote for Obama over, say, Santorum…but that’s saying very little.
    - tim_wayne
      
      http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/people-are-not-leaving-the-labor-force/
      People previously left the labor force are reentering the labor force and looking for jobs.
      
      Keynes has never been given a fair trial. His advice to the UK for post-war government finance called for separate operating and capital budgets. The operating budgets were to be balanced on average. Any necessary jobs stimulus was to be part of the capital budget, thus spent on projects with a real return.
      
      President Bush fucked up the budget when the economy is booming.
    - http://twitter.com/FossilSpark FossilSpark
      
      Actually, jobs are being created. That’s indisputable.
brerrabbit23

Oh good, a new opportunity to talk shit about the guy who succeeded in doing 90% of what you all wanted, and failed at the other 10% for reasons you can’t be bothered to read up on and understand.
Ian Osborne

I wish the puppets would stick around Sesame Street and not the White House.
neapel

Oh no, wasn’t Obama the guy who rolled this business up with a revolutionary online campaign? And four years later they don’t sink into the ground in shame with this video that shows nothing at all of the stuff that were actually praised about the campaign? I can sit there passively and consume video of any candidate, the only participatory action seen in the video is clicking “like” on a tumblr post.
Whoever approved this is clearly not an active user of any of these mediums. Take twitter. When do you actually scroll through a users profile page and check out their videos one by one? Take YouTube, when do you go onto a channel page and watch the videos in order? People subscribe to this, what’s interesting is the interplay between different users (in the video we see this hinted at as the Obama account posting a Palin video, when of course it should have shown my friends retweeting the Obama video and the Palin video, with emerging context, not this 100% controlled experience we’re shown here.)
This is not a real user’s experience. People didn’t vote for Obama because his website looked modern. They did after hours of arguments with Ron Paul supporters.
anharmyenone

I can’t decide between Sweet Meteor Of Death or Roseanne.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I would vote for her if she promised to move her television family into the White House as a reality show to help lower the national debt.
SCAQTony

When I hear Romney speak, I say to myself: “What a really bad liar!”
When I hear Obama speak, I to myself say: “Wow, what a really GREAT liar.”
- http://vimrc-dissection.blogspot.com/ Dummy00001
  
  Majority of people pick the best liar, because majority of people are simply incapable of handling the straight truth being hurdled at them.
Promethean Sky

Honestly, I like a lot of stuff that he’s accomplished. Severely disappointed in plenty as well. Probably my biggest issue is his willingness to compromise with the other side, when the other side is clearly insane. I may hate Bush, but that man had the ability to shove an issue through no matter what anyone thought. Obama could use some of that. The NDAA compromise left it better than it was, but still completely unacceptable, for example.
- http://vimrc-dissection.blogspot.com/ Dummy00001
  
  > Probably my biggest issue is his willingness to compromise with the other side, when the other side is clearly insane.
  
  Compromise is how you do accomplish things in the real world.
  
  As democracy goes, the more important question is why you keep electing and reelecting the insane people into the power?
JimTreacher

Obama 2012: He’s Handsome
noisycrane

I have to say I’m a bit suspicious that a good deal of anti-Obama sentiment originates from right wingers posturing as moderates. (not here but throughout the country and pundit-land) I mean that in the sense that no one should overlook the things Obama has done or let pass that have harmed our civil liberties, but for fuck’s sake, guys, c’mon! It hasn’t been so long that we can’t remember the path this country was on, right? And it’s not impossible to imagine the roadblocks from both parties, and from the people we’ve all elected, that make following through on EVERY promise difficult. In a sense, we’ve elected a president while simultaneously electing another group of politicians who actively oppose him because they just don’t like him, not because they disagree with what he’s doing!

So, while it’s easy to say how fed up you are with him, and how stupid you feel for electing him over another “celebrity”, it’s worth looking at the way in which we keep fucking ourselves over in other ways. I think the guy’s done a damn good job with the shit pile he was put in charge of, and I’ll happily vote for him again.

It’s not about the lesser of two evils, it’s about the best direction.