Obama Glamour Watch
With its much-discussed attack ads, the McCain campaign is trying to do something difficult: to puncture Barack Obama's glamour without resorting to insinuations of horror (the Manchurian Candidate fears mocked on The New Yorker's famous cover). The first attempt, the Paris-and-Brittany ad, was lame. It was neither funny nor convincing, and it confused glamour, which inspires, with tabloid celebrity, which titillates and makes the audience feel superior. (The claim that the ad is racist, because the tabloid princesses are white and blonde, is absurd.) Throwing in stuff about offshore drilling, presumably an attempt at substance, just made it weird.
The second ad, "The One," is more successful and more interesting. Here is full-bore 1990s (or 1980s, if you go back to Spy) hip comedic irony--laughing at the earnest and self-important. Mainstream political candidates don't do that, least of all if they're Republicans. Mainstream political candidates, Republicans especially, are the ones comedic ironists laugh at. Besides, comedic irony is for young people, not oldsters like John McCain.
Except the young people who made irony hip--late boomers and GenXers--are now middle-aged. Obama is selling an end to irony, a return to unchastened New Frontier liberalism, at least in feeling. (How that lines up with specific policy proposals is a more complicated question.) Maybe hip isn't hip any more.
McCain's ad is calculated to appeal to people who think that sort of grandiosity is ridiculous. Many of those people happen to be part of McCain's traditional "base," the media, including the irony-drenched talk shows from which lots of youngish people get their political news. Reminding them of Obama's grandiosity won't make them vote for McCain. But it might embarrass them into helping to puncture his opponent's glamour.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the People magazine cover of the Obama family sold worse than the magazine's average, 1.4 million copies versus a typical 1.45 million. Now Barack Obama covers usually sell very well--and, judging from my haphazard West LA survey, that New Yorker cover blew off newsstands within minutes--so what's up with People? The problem I think is that readers aren't interested in Obama-the-wholesome-family-man. They want The One.