When Paris Hilton Becomes a Voice of Reason

With her brilliant critique, Lisa Van Dusen continues to reveal the ineptitude of most U.S. political reporting and analysis. - zjm




By LISA VAN DUSEN

You know a presidential campaign has veered too far into the sludge when an intervention from Paris Hilton comes off like the voice of reason.

Somehow, last week, when the Bible-toting jailbird socialite said, in a video ad announcing her energy policy, "I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead," she was the only one around who really seemed to mean it.

After early assurances from both Barack Obama and John McCain that this would be a campaign of civilized respectability and Marquess of Queensberry rules, what had promised to be an epic battle is looking more and more like a John Hughes cafeteria food fight between a smartass, cynical outcast and a cool, detached principal, only with the old white guy playing the smartass and the young black guy playing the principal.

McCain, the candidate who coasted leisurely through June and early July like he was on an Elderhostel tour, is now running as though someone spiked his Ovaltine with crystal meth -- using drive-by attack ads, snarky put-downs and party favours to make Barack Obama's strengths seem ridiculous and his own weaknesses beside the point.

The point, according to the McCain campaign, is that nobody knows Obama and too many people are enamoured of him despite that fact for all the wrong reasons.

This is a line of attack that resonates with the same white, working-class voters who are suspicious of Obama's "otherness" based on his name, his skin colour and his exotic background, and who, the McCain campaign hopes, will now count "celebutante" as one more strike against him.

If there is anyone the economically-imperiled, mortgage crisis-besieged, health care-deficient, blue-collar workers of the rust belt have a hard time identifying with, it's Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

By including Barack Obama in the same ad as two women, whose lives are as alien to the daily reality of a Wal-Mart clerk as the lives of actual aliens would be, McCain is saying: "He's not like you, either." Because they already know Obama isn't the same colour as they are, it's more a reminder than a revelation.

More than halfway through a summer of shockingly drive-able Interstates left eerily unclogged by four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, the two campaigns have spent the past week going at each other on energy policy.

Where the candidates have clashed, and therefore where the sound bites have surfaced, the sniping has been not so much about the crisis itself, as about whether inflating your tires properly, as Obama has suggested, is a silly idea or not (McCain started out saying it was silly, then said it wasn't) and whether there is a square inch of American soil, turf or broadloom, off-shore or on, safe from Drillbit McCain.

McCain is taking heat from pundits and, in some cases, from his own former staffers, for going decidedly downscale with the Paris Hilton ad, as well as one mocking Obama's messiah thing (comparing him to Charlton Heston's Moses might backfire among the McCain-queasy fundamentalists).

He also took fire for playing the reverse-race card by accusing Obama of playing a real race card when he predicted that his opponents would try to scare people by pointing out that he doesn't look like all those other presidents in their wallets, which he doesn't.

In the longer term (and there is a longer term between now and November -- there's a longer
term between now and Labour Day, in campaign weeks), some Republicans fear McCain is swapping his considerable integrity stock for a fleeting return in the polls and that it won''t be there when he suddenly needs it between now and election day.

Obama, meanwhile, is still spending too many moments looking like a guy way too surprised that running for president of the United States could possibly get this ridiculous. He should be hitting instead of just hitting back, no matter how many times in the course of a long campaign hop he longs for what must now seem like the halcyon days of the bloody Pennsylvania primary.

Luckily for Obama, the Clintons have been agitating upstage just loudly enough to remind him of all they taught him about how badly he wants to be president. That should liven up the battleground some.