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Alicia Keys Makes Campaign Ad for President Obama

Alicia Keys is the latest black celebrity to step out there for President Obama, recording an affecting campaign ad showing her touring Philadelphia on behalf of the campaign and urging both young African-American girls and older women to make sure they show up for Obama on November 6.

During the commercial, we actually see Keys traveling around the city, making stops at key spots where she is interacting with Philadelphians and tweeting about her travels the entire time.

“So it’s excited to go to Philly today. It’s one of my favorite places,” Keys tweets at the beginning of the video.

She asks a group of teenage girls whether they are excited to vote. She gets an enthusiastic Yes in return.

“It’s going to be a close election and each and every one of us have to play our part and as the president always says grassroots organizing is definitely the heart and soul of this campaign,”  Keys says in the video.

At an Obama campaign office, surrounded by campaign workers, Keys says, “I want to see where the real work is happening—it’s happening right here. This is where the real thing is going down!”
On Twitter, she says of the West Philly field office, “The heart and soul of the campaign.”
Keys gives a speech at the Women’s Summit, where she stands before a large auditorium of women.
“I don’t think that anyone in this room is surprised by President Obama’s record on women’s issues,” she tells the crowd. “He was raised by such a powerful woman, he married a powerful woman and now he is raising two powerful women, so he definitely gets it. So now it’s our turn to thank him by voting for President Obama in November. We are a powerful force.”
Meanwhile, Keys told Essence magazine that unfortunately it appears the public will never get to see the video she shot with Beyonce to go with their 2009 collaborative effort “Put It In a Love Song.”

“Ohhh man! Y’all aren’t going to leave me alone about that!” she said. “Sometimes with creative things [it] all comes together and it’s (makes perfection kissing noise) and sometimes things almost come together and it’s better to just leave it. So we love that song. We had a ball shooting the video. It just so happens that the whole thing, for some reason or another, didn’t quite come together so we just decided to leave it. And that’s what happened.”

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