< Campaign Videos: A Time-Tested Election Tactic

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Even as the primary campaign continues, Republicans regularly take aim at the president. Independent groups have also run ads. A group called the American Future Fund describes itself as favoring free enterprise, and has run ads ripping the president for his ties to Wall Street.

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Tonight, the Obama campaign premiers its own video online, a documentary-style ad. Tom Hanks narrates, and it's directed by Davis Guggenheim, who got an Oscar for the Al Gore film "An Inconvenient Truth."

Movie-style tributes are far from new in presidential politics. NPR's Don Gonyea has a history.

DON GONYEA, BYLINE: It was 1952, and a war hero was running for president.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: The man from Abilene, out of the heartland of America, out of this small frame house in Abilene, Kansas, came a man, Dwight D. Eisenhower...

GONYEA: This film, with its grainy World War II footage and its shouting newsreel announcer, is really where the presidential biographical film got its start.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Through the crucial hour of historical D-Day, he brought us to the triumph and piece of VE-Day. Now another crucial hour in our history...

GONYEA: Since then, these films, shown on TV and at nominating conventions, have become a staple of presidential campaigns. Jimmy Carter's film was about an outsider from Georgia. Much of it was shot on the farm. The candidate wore a plaid shirt. The post-Watergate message was clear: This was a guy you could trust.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM)

PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: We've always worked for a living. We know what it means to work.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: And it was the working people, not the special interests, that Jimmy Carter represented as governor of the largest state east of the Mississippi.

GONYEA: Often there's an attempt to humanize the candidate. In a 1972 bio for the Nixon re-election campaign, the focus was on the breakthrough in diplomacy with China. In the midst of that, the film cuts to this moment featuring Nixon teasing his interpreter.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM)

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: I express my appreciation to my Chinese voice, to Mrs. Chung(ph). I listened to her translation. She got every word right.

GONYEA: One of the most memorable of these films premiered at the Democratic convention in 1992.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM)

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: I was born in a little town called Hope, Arkansas three months after my father died. I remember living in that old two story house where I lived with my grandparents. And I remember going to my grandfather's grocery store and...

GONYEA: Mark McKinnon, a media veteran who worked on George W. Bush's presidential campaigns, says that Bill Clinton movie worked because it told a very human story.

MARK MCKINNON: I think it was important to tell a story that a lot of Americans can relate to, to say, you know, boy, this is a guy who could be president, but met some of the very same challenges that I did or some of my family did. So it gave a real sense that Bill Clinton was a man of the people because he'd gone through very similar struggles.

GONYEA: McKinnon made biographical films for the two George W. Bush campaigns. The first basically introduced a candidate who, despite being a governor and a president's son, was not well known by many Americans. Four years later, for the Bush re-election, it was a very different kind of film.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM)

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

GONYEA: Today, a new one is added to the list. It's 17 minutes long. A trailer was released last week by the Obama campaign. You hear the voice of Tom Hanks.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM)

TOM HANKS: How do we understand this president and his time in office?

GONYEA: Releasing it this early gets the president's version of events out there while the GOP hopefuls are still beating each other up. You hear from White House aides.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM)

DAVID AXELROD: What was described in that meeting was an economic crisis beyond anything anybody had imagined.

GONYEA: As for exposure, today a video can zip around the world instantly on the Web and on smartphones, reaching audiences just about anywhere at any time and in all kinds of ways that the man from Abilene couldn't begin to imagine.

Done Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.

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