Just a quick comment on the new McCain commercial comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
In a country that turns out more enthusiasm for American Idol than American politics, spotlighting your opponent’s popularity and placing him in the same sphere of celebrity as the nation’s biggest tabloid-sellers doesn’t just help him and hurt you, it makes you seem really, really really old and out of touch.
Besides – as Craig Fuller (Republican strategist) reminded us last night – Ronald Reagan…pre-President…actual movie star…
Did no one on the McCain ad team think of that?
Their overt attempt to paint Obama as a celebrity by flashing images of him juxtaposed with Paris and Britney doesn’t justify why they chose those two to represent “celebrity.” Those two don’t even make the cut on Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list anymore.
Instead, it obviously it was an attempt to try to build on Rove’s strategy he laid out a month ago of trying to paint Obama as an uppity negro at the country club with his beautiful date combined with the tactic already successfully used by McCain’s campaign manager, Terry Nelson, of using an image of the black candidate with the slutty white girl just like he did to Harold Ford in 2006, only this is worse even because instead of using an actress trying to portray a sleazy white chick, they used Family Feud’s top 1 and 2 ‘survey says’ picks for the category.
That white ho with the black man is unfortunately still a very scary image that shocks people here in red state (bigot-central) USA, much more so that trying to link him to being a Muslim or bin Laden.
The thing is, which candidate is really more linked to a younger rich blond (drug addict)?
It just smells so desperate to me. All of it.
And when your opponent is running on change and hope b/c we’ve all had enough…and it’s working…giving us more of the same seems like a really bad strategy.
Here’s hoping it backfires!
And no one ever used racism as a political crutch more so than Ronnie Raygun. He perfected the subliminal "Southern Strategy" that is the basis for McCain's 'calabrity' attack ad.
I did a post documenting much of it last yr for C&L.
"Krugman v Brooks and Reagan’s ‘Mistaken’ Legacy of Racism“
er "celebrity"
The only thing I regret leaving out of that post at C&L was mentioning the time when Reagan had Col Oliver North involved with smuggling cocaine into the U.S. which directly led to the crack epidemic at the very same time he was declaring a war on drugs, building prisons and increasing the sentences that has resulted in the disenfranchizement of generations of mostly black would-be voters to this very day.