# 3 AM Ad "It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep." So begins the commercial [[Hillary Clinton]]'s campaign put on the air in Texas on February 29, 2008, four days before primaries she had to win. A phone is ringing in the White House. Something has happened in the world. The narrator asks who the viewer wants to answer it. The ad's official title is "Children." It never mentions [[Barack Obama]], and everyone understood it was about him. ## The ad The pictures are of sleeping children and a mother looking in on them. The sound is a telephone that keeps ringing. The narrator says the vote will decide who picks up, and describes the right person as someone who already knows the world's leaders and the military, someone tested. At the end Clinton is shown at a desk, awake, on the phone. It makes no claim about Obama's record. Its whole argument is a contrast in experience, delivered as a parent's worry. ## Who made it and who paid The Clinton campaign paid for it. It was made by Roy Spence, a Texas advertising executive the campaign had brought in a few weeks earlier. Spence had made nearly the same ad before: in the 1984 Democratic primaries his "red phone" commercial for [[Walter Mondale]] asked the same question about Gary Hart. The strategy behind it came from the campaign's chief strategist, Mark Penn, who has said the campaign knew it was well behind and wanted Clinton seen as the tested, tough candidate. ## Reaction Obama answered within hours. He told a Texas audience that Clinton was trying to "play on people's fears to scare up votes," and his campaign released its own ad the same day, "Ringing," which used the same ringing phone and argued that the question was judgment, pointing to his opposition to the Iraq war. Commentators compared the ad to the [[Daisy Ad]]. Clinton's communications director rejected the comparison, saying that ad imagined the apocalypse and this one did not. On cable news it played on a loop, and it was parodied on *Saturday Night Live*. One detail made the rounds a week later. The sleeping girl in the opening shot was stock footage, filmed years earlier. She was by then seventeen, had campaigned for Obama, and said on national television that she disliked the ad. ## What happened next Clinton won the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, ending a run of eleven straight losses. Because of Texas's hybrid system Obama came out of the state with more delegates anyway, and he won the nomination in June. Penn has said the question the campaign asked itself afterward was whether it should have run the ad earlier. Obama's reply that week was aimed at two people at once: he said both Clinton and [[John McCain]], the likely Republican nominee, had given the wrong answer on Iraq. After he won the presidency he appointed Clinton secretary of state. ## Why it's on the map - **It is a fear ad inside a party.** The [[Daisy Ad]] was aimed across the aisle. This one used the same emotional machinery, children and a threat left to the imagination, against a fellow Democrat. - **It attacks without a claim.** Like Daisy, it says nothing that can be checked. It asks a question and lets the viewer's doubts answer it. - **It was a remake.** The same ad-maker ran the same idea twenty-four years apart, for a different candidate against a different opponent. Formats in political advertising are recycled far more than they are invented. - **The phrase stuck.** "The 3 a.m. phone call" became the standard way to talk about whether a candidate is ready for a crisis, and it has been in use ever since. ## Connections - [[Hillary Clinton]] · [[Barack Obama]] · [[John McCain]] · [[Walter Mondale]] - [[2008 Presidential Election]] - [[Daisy Ad]] — the ancestor it was compared to - [[Political Ads Hub]]