Making the Pigs Squeal
By Phil Brennan
From the hysterical reaction it provoked you would have thought it was the kind of injury that makes pigs squeal - a TV commercial that used humor as a weapon to cut the high-flying Barack Obama down to size.
It's always been axiomatic in politics that you don't shoot arrows at dead tigers, meaning that attacks on a political stratagem are launched only when that tactic is working, not when it's failing.
Such is the case of the two TV commercials created by the McCain camp to more than suggest that Senator Obama is ... Well... Full of himself, a celebrity who is celebrated merely for being a celebrity.
In the first ad, Obama is by implication compared to the Misses Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, both world famous by virtue of merely being famous. It's an effective way of conveying the idea that in Obama's case, as in the cases of the two women, there's no there there, as Dorothy Parker would have put it.
The second ad is even more cutting, using a photo of the late Charlton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea to imply that Obama sees himself in that miraculous context.
Both ads are funny, and, for Obama, lethally so. They make people laugh, and in
both cases, the laughter is directed at Barack Obama. Nothing is more fatal to a candidate's aspirations for higher office that something that causes people to laugh at him. He is transposed into a figure of humor - more joke than candidate.
Nothing could be more illustrative of the deadly effects these ads are having than the near hysterical reaction of the Obama campaign and among his supporters.
The New York Times' Bob Herbert, an avid Obama supporter, shot this arrow at what he obviously understands is a very live tiger. As Pat Buchanan noted, Herbert accused McCain and the GOP of producing ads that are "slimy ... Foul, poisonous ... Designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women."
Wow!
Not to be outdone in hysteria was the Washington Post's Gene Robinson who said that McCain is "running a desperate, ugly campaign."
Translated: McCain is now running a very effective campaign and winning vast numbers of supporters with his inspired use of humor in reducing Obama's image to that of a mere mortal, and we don't like it one bit.
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