I confess to a weakness for puns. As Rodgers and Hart said when they based The Boys from Syracuse on The Comedy of Errors, “If it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for us.”

Maybe that’s why I like the ad from Citizens for the Republic called “Mourning in America” so much. It is, of course, a play on the classic Reagan campaign ad from 1984 called “Morning in America.” (You can see them both here. Play the Reagan one first.) But the ad works even if you don’t get the pun and, after all, you’d have to be in your forties to remember the 1984 campaign. With sadness, not anger, it makes it clear how colossal has been the failure of the Obama administration to bring about prosperity while implicitly noting that Reagan’s policies to do so had been a howling success.

TV ads are the poetry of our age and the great ones, like great poems, can add to the lexicon of everyday discourse (“Where’s the beef?”). Political ads run from the vicious to the sublime. It seems that the former is the province of the left this year. I hope conservatives will stick with the sublime.