SAD, SILLY, DESPERATE


and incompetent.

Everyone seems to be talking about that sad and silly and embarrassingly desperate new John McCain Celebrity attack ad. The Obama camp is back in full umbrage mode. (Funny, I think, that a group of people so quick to spot racism everywhere else was so slow to acknowledge its existence at Trinity United Church of Christ.) The McCain camp is back in full rationalization mode. (But the ad makes a serious political point at the end! Sort of...) Partisan bloggers on the left are willfully misreading, then hysterically misrepresenting, the piece. (It's not a failed attempt to suggest Obama is as lightweight and inexplicably adored for dubious as accomplishments as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton; it's a coded, subtle bit of racism that suggests the scary, black Obama boasts a taste for young white women!) Partisan bloggers on the right are willfully misjudging, then wildly overpraising, it. (It's not a failed attempt to suggest Obama is as lightweight and inexplicably famous for being famous as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton; it's a shrewd and brilliant and surprisingly savvy way to play the media and get people buzzing about your message!)

It's all enough to make your head explode. Or at least to make you wanna throw your computer monitor through the nearest window. But before you do that -- and I would not blame you if you did -- allow me to point out something that, in their headlong froth to find evil partisan demons lurking behind every rhetorical corner, no else seems to have noticed: that the ad's sadness, silliness, and desperation are exceeded by its incompetence.

Senator Obama, after all, looks awfully good in it: smiling, striding confidently, speaking and waving to huge, adoring crowds:



Even that last shot, with the Higher Taxes, More Foreign Oil titles fading in and out, shows him smiling and and looking off into the distance and bathed in a light so heavenly you'd swear it was for the cover of next week's Newsweek:



My God. Obama doesn't look that good in his own commercials! He's warm, he's glowing, he's sexy -- and he's apparently been endorsed by JohnMcCain.com. Which candidate are they supporting here? Don't they know how to make even a bargain basement attack ad? Where's the grainy black-and-white photo? Where's the scowl, the frown, the grimace? Where are all the scary wolves?

Even in a campaign where the insouciance of the candidate and the indifference of his advisors seem perfectly suited, this ad is inexplicable. If its mix of bungled rhetoric and bumbling execution is any indication of how Senator McCain would run the country, perhaps he really is running for George W. Bush's third term.

Posted: Thu - July 31, 2008 at 10:04 AM          

©