LOS ANGELES – In a classic Hollywood ending that left audiences cheering and wiping tears from their eyes, President Obama triumphed over his Republican rival Mitt Romney in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, after staging a stunning come-from-behind upset that had seemed nearly impossible several scenes earlier.
In the Hollywood version of the election, President Obama managed to successfully overcome centuries of deep-seated racial prejudice and hundreds of millions of dollars in manipulative negative advertising to narrowly win a second term as the nation's first African-American head of state.
As the final results were announced – following a breathtaking, too-close-to-call, election-deciding victory for Obama in the state of Ohio – the First Lady and the President's children ran to embrace him on the stage of his campaign's election night event, as the music of Oscar-winning composer John Williams' score rose in a majestic celebratory crescendo.
Following a summer downturn in the nation's economic recovery, the President's chances of reelection had begun to appear bleak in the weeks leading up to the Hollywood version of the election. However, when all seemed lost, his political tides were miraculously turned by a last-minute surge of support from a highly unlikely source that could only have been born in a screenwriter's imagination.
In classic Hollywood fashion, the outcome of the entire imaginary election scenario ultimately came to hinge on the actions of a single individual – Caleb Patterson, a 48-year-old unemployed former Ohio factory worker and widower father of two young daughters, who had been strongly opposed to the President's reelection based on some unspecified misinformation or misunderstanding he apparently had about the Wall Street bailout of 2008.
Then, over the course of six increasingly tear-jerking scenes, Mr. Patterson's hard-hearted anti-Obama sentiment was transformed by a tragic experience involving one of his daughters and some kind of life-threatening illness that suddenly opened his eyes to the beneficial realities of the President's signature Health Care Reform Act.
In a rapid quick-cut montage sequence, accompanied by Little Milton's classic soul track "We're Gonna Make It", Mr. Patterson was then seen vigorously campaigning for President Obama door-to-door across the state of Ohio all by himself, with no explanation given as to who was at home watching his children.
In the end, Mr. Patterson's improbable personal campaign led to an even more improbable national TV interview with him just one day before the election, during which he somehow managed to utter the most succinct, heartfelt and inspiring endorsement of the President imaginable, as what appeared to be the entire nation simultaneously watched him on live television – this despite the fact that the interview would in reality probably have been recorded and people would have watched it at various times according to their local time zones and TiVo habits.
The Hollywood version of the election concluded with a scene of the victorious President, his wife and their children, pulling back to reveal Mr. Patterson, his two daughters and the ghost of his beautiful deceased wife sitting on their sofa together happily watching the elated First Family on TV.
Finally, in a related story, it is now expected that unlimited spending by conservative Super PACs combined with voter susceptibility to deceptive campaign advertising, general voter ignorance, and widespread suppression of minority voting by Republican-controlled state legislatures will most likely result in President Obama's defeat in the actual election scheduled for November 6th.