That Should have been Tiger, Oprah, and Obama
Via Andrew Sullivan, John Riley makes an excellent point:
We just got off a conference call with Camp McCain, defending their new ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.They said they thought the ad was legitimate because Obama is a big celebrity (which happens to be what John McCain was, too, when he came home from Vietnam and started to build his political career), and Britney and Paris were Number 2 and 3.
The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday’s news. Here’s a link to Forbes’ Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don’t even make the list any more.
Instead, the top 10, in order: Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Angelina Jolie, Beyonce Knowles, David Beckham, Johnny Depp, Jay-Z, The Police, JK Rowling, Brad Pitt.
So, they didn’t pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married.
What they picked was two sexually available white women.
But it must have been a coincidence, because we know John McCain wants to run an elevated campaign focusing on the serious issues that America faces.
The most charitable one could be would be to say that McCain’s people wanted to convey the idea that Obama was just as silly, simple, and vacuous as Britney and Paris. But it’s kind of hard to ignore the subtext–either these people were simply incompetent, or they fully realized that Britney and Paris don’t top the list and would contrast disturbingly to many “values-sensitive” Americans in a racial/sexual sense. But to point out Oprah and Tiger Woods along with Obama would have elevated him in public opinion, not slimed him. One can only guess that these clever attack dogs felt they could slip in a twofer.
Allow me to be a little less nuanced about it. Rove’s a goog ol’ suthurn boy. I read about this many months ago on TPM. Rove has a very specific image of Obama that he wants crafted: As a country club elite black person juxtaposed with a beautiful blond person.
There’s reason for this. It triggers an emotional response to emotional biggotry. Many southerners are no longer racist on an intellectual level. But on an emotional level maybe many others still are. There’s a deep seated loathing of blacks taking and spoiling the white women. So he wants him to be cast as a country club person, that is, as an elite, which carries some resentment amongst white working class, and then to burn that resentment into the voters, he wants that image to be accompanied with beautiful blond women.
As Obama says, there’s nothing about that that has anything to do with policy. But Rove knows that all ‘buy’ decisions are based upon an emotion. And he thinks he has access to that emotion by these means. If policy mattered, the republican’s wouldn’t have trashed the country and its institution with reckless abandon. So he’s quite happy to bypass things like policy and go straight to the emotional aspect of it.
There’s a special place in hell for rove.