Friday, August 5, 2011

Give a Man a Job

David Karol alerted me to this fantastic 1933 video of Jimmy Durante plugging FDR's National Recovery Administration, urging wealthy audience members to hire people as a great patriotic act. (Watch for Moe Howard!)


Obviously, Obama has tried to sell his stimulus efforts in a very different way than Roosevelt tried to sell his. It's frankly difficult to imagine the modern White House working with a major studio to put out a film clip like this in which Jessica Alba urges business owners to take on more employees in front of a portrait of Obama. It would be labeled dictatorial socialism -- as FDR's efforts were. Somewhat more problematically, it would probably be seen as a joke.

Also, Jimmy Durante was never young.

2 comments:

marc said...

I think we could use this sort of thing, seriously. Think about the It Gets Better campaign, which has been so successful. I bet Tom Hanks, Will Smith and Justin Timberlake could pull this off. Particularly if it was a simple remake of the Durante clip. Maybe localize it, like instead of the President at the end, have a state flag, and maybe have the stars rotate around where they are from. Except for the Canadians.

It took me about a minute to really get that the NRA wasn't the gun lobby.

Seth Masket said...

I suppose they could borrow a lot from the "It Gets Better" campaign -- even the title.