Exactly what's needed.

What a change from the traditional scary-music-and-fuzzy-photo political ads. Seems very genuine, very refreshing. I wonder how a two minute ad fits into a TV schedule? Is that an entire commercial break?  

Commercial breaks can change depending on how much time they sell, and if they don't sell enough time to fill in the gaps left for the ads, then they can just fill the time with PSA's.

So, to answer your question, there is no answer.  George Allen bought some 2 minute spots in 2006 after his meltdown.

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Felt good!

but I hate when they use this media player. It doesn't post to my Facebook account so I can't spread Barack's message with all my otherwise-apathetic college friends who plan on voting for the first time this November.

They played about 15 seconds of it, declared it horribly boring and a bad idea - how could the audience tell?  We didn't get to hear the ad - then asked Mort Zuckerman if he agreed, which of course he did.  Later they played McCain's newest ad - the whole thing - then bubbled on and on about how it had pictures and zip and wasn't all boring like two minutes of Obama talking to the camera.  The comments included at least one snark about the nice looking couch in the background.

Thanks, Scarborough, for raising my blood pressure so early in the morning.

and complain loudly about not seeing the whole ad? This sort of thing is so prejudicial, and they need to have their tongues cut out. Or something. A customer complaint is never impractical, the nastier the better, repeated. Maybe you should demand they repeat the ad for free, just to be good reporters.  

I found their e-mail address and wrote a lengthy, detailed complaint.  Accused Joe of acting like a twitchy teenager with ADD and of disrespecting adults who don't need to be entertained and distracted in order to focus on something important to real grownups who might want to hear what Obama has to say about the economy.  

huffpo

Yet despite the seriousness of this crisis, Joe Scarborough (along with Wee Willie Geist and Salon's Joan Walsh, oddly enough) mocked the ad for its lack of soundbytes and its abundance of specifics.

Lack. Of soundbytes.

Now there's an argument to be made in favor of short, pithy framing in politics, but this isn't a short, pithy crisis. It's a crisis that's nailing ordinary Americans quite literally in their own back yards. It's entirely symptomatic of 30 years of Republican deregulation and Reaganomics. 30 years of free market wingnut crapola culminating in something close to the Great Depression, with Senator McCain quoting Herbert Hoover dozens of times this year alone -- and, what? A two minute commercial is too long, Joe? Are you so basted in savory McCain barbecue sauce, Joe, that your candidate's cluelessness has, by some form of dry rub osmosis, infected your already shovel-shaped view of this global disaster?

Soundbytes and nonspecifics. Yessir. That's just what (and I repeat) the worst financial crisis in a century deserves. Soundbytes and nonspecifics like, "The fundamentals of the economy are strong." Heckuva job. Your candidate is a total doof when it comes to the economy, Joe. Admit it.

So then, with the addition of Newsweek's very serious Jon Meacham, the very serious conversation evolved into concern-trolling about the polls. Why, Scarborough wondered, is Senator Obama not way ahead of McCain in the polls? Why is the race so tight?

to sum up:

Riddle me this, Joe. Given the ideological landscape of cable news, talk radio and the nefarious lie-based caricature therein of Obama as a black-power, fetus-crushing Muslim terrorist, why isn't John McCain 20 points ahead in polls?

This is a great ad, even if it doesn't have a plentitude of mindless sound bites. It treats the American voter as if s/he is an adult. I wonder if it will have wide distribution in mainstream television?

It could not touch on a lot of other dire topics, by which I mean the godawful messes the next President will have to deal with on that famous Day One. I brought up a few of these incipient storms back on May 3rd here on RaisingKaine.  I'm not prescient, but among those storm signals were both bailouts and Level 3 bombshells hidden on Wall Street. See http://www.raisingkaine.com/sh... for a spring take on this latest mess in early fall.