John McCain Concedes Youth Vote
By RP Staff | August 5, 2008
When John McCain said a few weeks back that he would “rather lose a political campaign than lose a war,” it was easy to assume that Iraq was the only battle to which he was referring. However, it is now becoming that embedded in that quote was McCain’s strategy for another battle in which he was engaged. Rather than fight his general election opponent Barack Obama in the battle for the “youth vote,” McCain has instead opted to surrender. Prior to surrendering in this contest to lure young voters, McCain as expected lit a series of fires to cover his tracks. The first was the video ad produced by his campaign comparing Obama’s popularity to that of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and the second was accusing his opponent of playing “the race card.” We won’t even discuss the “race card” comment because that term is so twentieth-century, which for millions of voters under 25 in this country might as well have been pre-historic era.
McCain’s “Celebrity” video unmasked the perceptions that up to now his campaign had been doggedly trying to override, which is that McCain is a ornery old man who is out of touch with the American electorate. He may not be out of touch in a great guy to get a beer with sense of the term, but definitely out of touch when it comes to things like computers, the internet, and presumably pop cultural references. If McCain had been in tune with any of these things then he would have realized that while drawing maybe a few giggles from the senior set in Arizona, comparing Obama to Hilton and Spears is like comparing Dubya’s kids to soldiers, it just wouldn’t register.
The other flawed element in McCain’s video is how in comparing Obama to America’s favorite damsels in dysfunction, McCain threw his own image and brand into comparison with Spears and Hilton, which is where it really gets ugly. McCain’s staffers should have told him about something called “hateration,” which is what he was doing big time in his campaign ad–and few things are more reviled in this world than haters. To put it in republican terms, “haters” are for the rest of the world what terrorists are for people whose mental alarms have been set by Karl Rove. It would have been one thing for McCain to have produced “Celeb” if he had stayed clear of acting like a celebrity himself, but as the two clips below show, McCain has spent much of this campaign trying to get put on:
and numero dos…
The McCain campaign’s personalized version of MTV Cribs and his appearance on talk shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live reveals the fact that he too has ambitions of becoming an American idol. Ever since Bill Clinton’s breakout success with the MTV generation elite presidential candidates have been toeing the line between trying to be cool, without coming across as silly, or looking like the old dude at the party. By making what amounts to a campaign version of a dis record, McCain’s camp has stooped to a level that neither of his recent peers would have dared. He has tried turning the presidential campaign into a tabloid battle.
Of course as they say in Hollywood the only bad press is no press. McCain’s antics have made him the focal point of the newswire of late. Ironically it was only a few weeks ago that McCain was being lauded for staying quiet as Obama scuttled around making pronouncements and responding to everything uttered. Now it’s McCain who has caught a bad case of political foot in mouth syndrome. Having essentially conceded the youth vote with his latest actions, it will be interesting to see what kind of base McCain aligns himself with moving forward.
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