Coming from 'NYT' on Sunday: Why McCain's Attacks on Obama as 'Celebrity' May Backfire

In a piece coming this Sunday in The New York Times magazine, Matt Bai suggests that, despite recent gains in the polls, John McCain's charge that Barack Obama is a "celebrity" may, in fact, backfire. He titles his essay, "The Case for Cool."

The issue also feature a cover story on Obama's economic views.

In his article, Bai asks, "who's to say that Americans are misguided for craving a little cool in their candidates? ...The infatuation with star quality reflects, on some level, the yearning for the next Roosevelt....or Kennedy....some reformer with the dynamism and charisma to renew a dialogue at home and kinships around the world...

"It's curious that McCain would disparage the force of this undercurrent in American politics: after all, he was its beneficiary when he ran in 2000."

Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, have "internalized the lessons of Reagan and Bush. Instead, it is McCain who has fallen into the classic Democratic trap of equating celebrity with emptiness and broad thematics with a lack of depth."

His silly Obama/Britney/Paris Hilton ad "may not help. For one thing, unlike Gore or Kerry, McCain has nevef been mistaken for a policy wonk, and he flubs important details with some frequency; it's not as if his command of substance makes Obama seem like a marshmallow by comparison.

"But the larger problem with campaigning against cool is that it seldom actually works. Too often, when you mock celebrity, you also seem to be mocking all the people who get to define celebrity--which is to say, American consumers. In a way, McCain's celebrity ad could be the 2008 version of Gore's infamous sighs. It says, If you really find this character compelling, then there's got to be something wrong with you, too."
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Greg Mitchell's new book is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq. He is editor of Editor & Publisher.

Comments

[oscartucker]

Jealousy and envy are driving those "celebrity" ads. The green-eyed monster rears its head. McCain is upset about the large groups who go to see Obama, the warm reception Obama receives, the genuine charisma Obama has, the education(McCain wanted a liberal arts education, but he HAD to go into the naval academy), and ofcourse, the Karl Rove group working for McCain are pushing to make negative the very achievements made by Obama that everyone loves to call the "American Dream".

[phughez]

The jealous old man syndrome will be difficult for McCain to shake--no matter how he tries to put Obama down, McCain feels inferior to his tall, well-educated, youthful opponent who is already more popular in the world than he is.

[Dustee]

But, but...John McCain is a P.O.W.

[grendl]

The key to turning the tables on McCain was for Barack Obama to stand up and say " I'm not dating Paris Hilton, if that's what the inference is. Nor did I make a sex tape, nor am I the daughter of a hotel magnate, so what he's getting at, is entirely unclear to me. So some famous people support me. They're Americans too. Some famous people support Senator McCain. If that's the metric by which we're judging a candidate now, you'd be hard pressed to find a candidate who didn't have celebrity endorsement.
See in the absence of a substantive argument against my candidacy, Mr. McCain is trying to confuse the American public. He's trying to paint me as an elitist. Have you seen my shoes lately? And my wife is no beer heiress. I make my money the old fashioned way, not the way the GOP does, by getting elected based on boogeymen they dangle before the electorate like a rubber spider who they let get away in Afghanistan while they attack oil rich nations and hook their Halliburton and Black water buddies up with fat contracts.
And so on...Jesus Barack throw a punch once in your life.