McCain ad: hide your white women from Obama

A recent John McCain television ad ^[1] attempts to depict Barack Obama as a “celebrity” on the order of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, who make brief appearances in the ad, long enough — the McCain admen hope — for the average American, never a too discerning individual, to formulate somewhere in his often numbskull brain a few blurry equations. If these ads did not actually “define” candidates, as the admen intend (in this case that Obama is an “elitist,” whatever that means and whatever effect it has on his ability to govern), they would be laughable for the adolescent perspective from which they emerge. Not that history hasn’t shown that such ads don’t work; they apparently do: think Willie Horton ^[2] and John Kerry. 

Political campaigns as played by the Republicans is a pretty nasty business; no tactic is low, cynical or pernicious enough as long as it can sway a voter away from the opposition.  In the ad in which Spears and Hilton appear, the intent is clear, and it’s not that the creators of the ad want voters to think primarily that Obama is an arrogant celebrity. Any number of celebrities of all races and genders and sexual orientation could have been placed in the ad as representatives of this class of individuals. And the appearance of these two women in the ad is not even to get the viewer to equate Obama with the kind of mentality that has led Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton to reveal their coochies to millions of people around the globe. The key symbol in the ad is the “young blond woman,” the same symbol used in the ad meant to derail the 2006 Senatorial campaign of Harold Ford (“Call me, Harold” ^[2]).      

The monkey brains behind this ad want the viewer to think of our wives and daughters — generally the white female — who are at risk of being ravished by black men, especially powerful ones, whenever in close proximity to them. If this was not the intent, then why not represent “celebrity” by showing George Clooney or Elton John or Hillary Swank in the ad? No, the thinking must have gone, a young blond to fit the cliché of the latent fear that the black man is constantly salivating over the chance to defile the white woman is needed. This assumes, of course, that white women have no defenses against the advances of men, black or white, wanting to bed them, not even their morality, which indicates a dim view of women and which might just be a miscalculation on the part of the McCain camp. What if many women don’t see themselves as prey to black men? What if it can’t be so blithely assumed that women are always the potential sexual victims of black men?

But I doubt that women are the main target here. The admen seem to conceive of a world in which women are either fragile and in need of protection by men from other men wanting to get in their pants or that at any given moment, ala Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton, they might give into their weaknesses and succumb to the attentions of other men, particularly a black man with a degree from Harvard and an unusual name. If this is the actual world, then it might be time to dust off those chastity belts to affix to the loins of those women who might be considering a vote for Obama.