John McCain’s Celebrity
September 21, 2008
Proceeding Sen. Obama’s Middle Eastern/European trip the McCain Campaign opened a new offensive front against the Obama Campaign. While Obama was speaking before a crowd of 200,000 adoring Berliners McCain was dodging jars of applesauce in aisle 7. Something had to be done and quick. The idea was to attempt to turn one of Obama’s strengths into a weakness. This is a standard in the GOP’s current brand of Rovian Politics and had been used before when the McCain camp tried to turn Obama’s oratorical prowess into a disadvantage. This time they would use Obama’s wild popularity to paint him as merely an empty celebrity.
It is easy to argue that in the simplest sense of the word nearly all politicians are celebrities due to their visibility in the public eye. However it is clear that the McCain camp did not mean “famous” or “well-known” in their use of the word. Rather it wanted to make an association with other words like “empty” and “vacuous”. This tactic was used with alarming success in the pre-convention weeks and was abandoned only when economic turmoil forced a return to more serious issues.
What I found alarming wasn’t the tacit admittance that McCain could only win the Presidency by lowering the standards of the office. That is just what I have come to expect from Steve Schmidt (McCain Campaign chief strategist and Rove protege). The alarming aspect is that while this approach was doing real damage to Obama’s image his campaign did nothing to combat it. It seems like it would have been easy enough to turn the tables since McCain himself was in a major Hollywood movie.
Here is Sen. McCain making a cameo in the 2005 movie “Wedding Crashers” alongside onetime strategist and longtime Clinton friend James Carville (strange bedfellows no doubt).
Also alarming is the fact that aside from one MSNBC show the national media seems to have almost completely overlooked this contradiction.
