Democrats Take Financial Reform Fight to Airwaves

The fight over of financial regulation reform has been largely restricted to the U.S. Senate, but the Democratic National Committee is taking its first major step to make this a broader public discussion as the upper chamber irons out its bill.

The DNC will begin airing this minute-long ad nationwide tomorrow on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN:

Financial reform remains an obscure thing, to some degree: it entails a multifaceted approach that was laid out by the Treasury Dept. early on in the administration, and it is just now being ironed out in the Senate after the Banking Committee passed Chairman Chris Dodd's bill.

Enter the DNC, with its early push to frame and contextualize financial reform as a response to the crash and as a price big banks must pay for the massive TARP bailout they received. The ad feels like a flashback to the post-crash rage over bailouts and bonuses that dominated U.S. politics for the first half of 2009. With health care complete, it's as if we're picking up where we left off.

Also: the first voice one hears, other than the narrator saying "2008," is of Fox's Shepard Smith. Given how Democrats and Fox have clashed in the Obama era, it's an interesting point to note.

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