Rick Perry meets Michael Bay

I don't think I've ever seen political advertising employ action-film-trailer techniques to quite the same degree. It's undoubtedly the most laughably grand thing I've seen all day. Amy Davidson pulls it apart:

The Hill thought the opening looked like “a trailer for a zombie movie,” and, on the whole, it has the logic of something Jerry Bruckheimer would have put together: doom impending, accentuated by news clips, then the hero comes, surrounded by hopeful, neighborly faces. It even borrows the motif, from “Armageddon,” of a small child holding up a toy aircraft as real ones fly overhead. There are also quick glimpses of Perry as a young Air Force pilot. With Obama, it seems to say, we are solitary, poor, and have nothing, because he is a nothing—it repeatedly turns the “O” in his name into a zero. With Perry we’ll have lots of friends, and we won’t have to take the subway. 

One thing you must find particularly strange is that the ad is titled Proven Leadership. I'm not entirely sure in which part of the clip we can find evidence of such leadership, but okay. A tip to Perry: don't try so hard; it looks utterly stupid.