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Santorum's 'Obamaville' Ad Warns Of 2nd-Term Horror

Rick Santorum trailer screenshot

Rick Santorum has a not so little problem standing between him and a general-election face-off with President Obama — Mitt Romney.

But that's not stopping the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania from focusing a new negative ad/movie trailer against the president instead of the former Massachusetts governor whose substantial delegate lead appears to have him and not Santorum headed to the Republican presidential nomination.

The trailer, which previews a video series Santorum's campaign plans to unveil on its website in coming days, depicts a dystopian future where everything bad that can happen does, save for Hunger Games-like fights to the death between teens.

Actually, that's an exaggeration. The future horrors in an Obama second term are all the common GOP bill of particulars against him: high gas prices and jobless rates, the loss of religious freedom, Iranian appeasement, in short the usual suspects.

Still, the music, narration and visuals could have sprung from the mind of Stephen King.

One fascinating moment in the highly produced video comes about 40 seconds in when the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears on a TV.

For a split second, the screen flips to Obama then back to the Iranian leader in an attempt to link the two on a subliminal level.

Marketing experts say subliminal messages don't really work, whether it's to sell consumer products or political candidates. But that doesn't stop people from continuing to use the technique.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Frank James joined NPR News in April 2009 to launch the blog, "The Two-Way," with co-blogger Mark Memmott.