THE hottest name in politics now is a comedian. That’s Tina Fey, whose impersonation of Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is a must-watch for anyone looking for a laugh in these tough days when credit is drying up.
Fey’s name cropped up everywhere, from casual conversations to no-nonsense events such as “Politics 2008”, a TimeWarner summit co-hosted by Time and CNN earlier this week.
The Emmy Award-winning star is the latest example of the great marriage between politics and pop culture in America.
Even a video featuring Paris Hilton calling John McCain a “white hair dude” has been viewed 7.8 million times since it first appeared two months ago on www.funnyordie.com.
That’s a comedy video website which approached Hilton to respond to the Republican presidential contender who earlier ran a campaign advertisement calling Barack Obama a megacelebrity and equating him to the likes of Hilton and Britney Spears.
Politics is serious business but humour is always a winner.
A “campaign ad” on www.bigfootnessie08.com suggested Bigfoot or Nessie for president.
“Tired of the same old attacks? The same old politics? It’s time for a change,” said the voice-over, recommending “Bigfoot. He’s eight feet tall and hairy.”
Going by its rationale, big steps require big feet and Bigfoot gets entirely what is ailing America now.
Last year’s much-talked about video was the Obama Girl, a creation of Barely Political.com about a sexy, young woman declaring her affection for the Democratic candidate.
“Our debut video, Crush on Obama, was named one of 2007’s 10 best videos by Newsweek, People Magazine, the AP and YouTube,” the site declared.
Besides Obama Girl, most Americans seem to be favouring the Illinois senator currently as he is leading in the polls with just 17 days left in the countdown to Election Day. Still, that does not really translate to joy and laughter yet for the cautious Obama supporters, especially those who are anxious about “the Bradley effect”.
That refers to Tom Bradley, the African American mayor of Los Angeles who lost the race for California governor in 1982 despite poll numbers stating that he would win handsomely.
For a more recent example, think Democratic’s John Kerry, who everyone thought would be hailed the new commander in chief in the last presidential battle in 2004.
“No one knows who is going to win this election,” wrote The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on Tuesday.
The media, he scoffed, were too taken up by “wildly proliferating polling data that tell us basically nothing.”
Or, as Burson-Marsteller worldwide president Mark J. Penn put it: The press is so caught up covering the polls and not the policies.
“All this comes down to what the role of the press is?” he asked at the “Politics 2008” summit.
Penn, who was also the senior strategist for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, remarked that the press was merely focussed on “what the story of the day is.”
Presidential debates have not been much helpful, either, in providing Americans a better picture of the candidates especially their economic plans.
“The debates have been completely uninformative events,” said David H. Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities International. Both candidates, he felt, had squandered away chances to explain to Americans about the economic meltdown, “about what’s going on, and how we got here.”
“Neither of them had stood out,” he told a briefing at the Foreign Press Centre (FPC) in New York. In that sense, he believed, it was still a tight race.
Words don’t matter much anymore, must less from the mouths of politicians. “We should probably take with a dose of salt what the candidates are saying because it doesn’t say much about how they are going to govern later,” economist Ken Goldstein said at the FPC briefing on “Presidential Campaign: The Wall Street Perspective — McCain/Obama Economic Policies”.
At the end of the day, amidst financial blues, the national conversation of the common people is: Are we going to be poor?
The economic slump and the fear of job losses have pushed out other usually hot topics. When Connecticut ruled last week that gay marriages would be allowed in that state, the news caused a ripple, not a roar.
Unless a major news event happens within the next two weeks, “all the stuff that the candidates are saying now; to the people, it’s just more talk, that’s all,” said CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin at the “Politics 2008” summit.
