You are using an outdated browser.
Please upgrade your browser
and improve your visit to our site.
Skip Navigation

It's 3:00 Am, I Must Be Lonely

Wow, Jason, you're right: what a strange ad for Clinton. (See below.) The narrator tells us, twice, that "it's 3:00 AM and your children are asleep" when a call comes to the White House. From this we're supposed to conclude that we need a Tested and Ready president in Hillary Clinton, who as First Lady was apparently answering these calls, perhaps because her husband was shacked up at the time. Okay, fine.

But isn't pretty much everybody asleep at 3:00 AM? And what do my kids have to do with it? Sure, the president could get a call about a terrorist cell forming in Pakistan or something, but that isn't going to effect my kids, or me, in the middle of the night. We can wait until morning to read about it in the news.

The image in the commercial seems to be taken for commercials for home alarms, and it's pretty effective in that context -- exploiting the fear that your kids will be snatched from their beds by burglars while you sleep. As a parent of young kids I get paranoid about this all the time late at night. But the president isn't going to get a call about burglars in your house, and even if they did, I don't see how Clinton's First Lady experience would help her catch them better than Obama.

--Jonathan Chait