Barack Obama Presents His New Re-election Campaign Slogan

Forward. If back in 2008, the candidate Barack Obama presented himself as guaranteed change, if he was surrounded by posters with the word “hope” during political meetings, four years later the message is different. The President, candidate for re-election in November, asks Americans to keep moving forward.

The video presented this week, which lasts more than seven minutes, is a reminder of the economic situation the country was facing when Obama took office. It contains a series of images of late 2008 and early 2009 which show different television presenters who narrate the economic decline, the dramatic fall in the employment rate and the feeling of crisis that the U.S. is still recovering from.

The campaign tries to seek support in the voices of the television presenters and in the familiarity of their faces to explain what state the country was in when the President took office. The U.S. was immersed in one of the most important economic recessions of the country and, according to the “Forward” motto, it was able to overcome this crisis thanks to a series of measures approved by Obama during the last three years: the health care reform, a financial rescue plan—that according to the President’s campaign would have saved more than four million jobs, the end of the war in Iraq, new regulations in the financial industry and the end of discrimination against homosexuals in the U.S. Army.

And, as in any campaign video, the attack on the opposition could not be absent. “Instead of working together to lift America up, Republicans were waging a campaign to tear the President down,” the narrator says while showing images of conservatives’ faces such as talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

Forward is the focus of Obama’s campaign, which revolves around the figure of a president who has done everything possible to save the nation from one of the worst crises in its history. “While there’s still more to do, there’s been real progress because President Obama never stopped believing in us and fighting for us,” says the video, which is added to a series of ads like “The Journey,” where the Democratic candidate has already written his letter for the next election.

The recording was presented through the President’s channel on YouTube, coinciding with his surprise visit to Afghanistan, where he signed a post-war cooperation agreement. Although the end of this conflict is not part of the video, it makes reference to two other major achievements of Obama’s administration that will also have relevance to the campaign: the death of Osama Bin Laden and the end of the war in Iraq.

In recent years, Obama’s campaign has tried with the slogan “Win the Future,” but it seems to prefer a more direct and positive slogan. “Forward” also allows it to include the letter ‘o’ , suggesting the sun rising over the horizon, which was already used for the campaign logo in 2008.

Meanwhile, the candidate Mitt Romney has already responded to the video publication with another ad that criticizes the President’s “broken promises.”