Entries Tagged 'Politics' ↓

Some people find Hillary Clinton’s campaign logic confusing. You know: Offering the vice-presidency to Obama when he has more delegates; campaigning on “experience” when she’s held elected office for a shorter time period than he has, etc.

But it’s not all that hard to understand, as these 1-minute shorts make clear. Just watch, and ignore your better judgment. Soon it will all be perfectly clear.

People always get the leadership they deserve.

It was getting ugly there, for a second, with the, “you’d make a good vice-president” stuff, and dusty Geraldine Ferraro talkin’ that talk!

But since Hillary Clinton has said she’s sorry “to Black voters,” we can take up right were we left off: Pointing out what this race is really about on a certain level, thanks to the clip.

In truth, it’s more twistedness from political mashup theorist Michael Stevens, right, the brain behind CamPain 2008. Some of the piece looks creepy, e.g., the smooch itself, and Chelsea’s wink at the end. But favorite details abound: Hillary’s “thought balloons,” clearly taken from the audiobook of her autobio, Living History; Wolf Blitzer’s discomfort; the close-ups of approving Hollywood tag-alongs.

In fact, since you’ve been good, also gander at Mike’s other amazing spectacles: a happy-go-lucky rip on the thankfully dead campaign of Rudy Giluiani; Hillary killing crowds with her passion for change; a John Edwards promo that should stop any still-remaining “Obama running mate” chatter; John McCain’s vain attempt to connect with younger voters; and what comes off to me as a Jack Nicholson-styled endorsement of Ron Paul by R. Kelly, if you can get your head halfway around that. Collect the whole set.

The Alfa Romeo Brera: Sex on wheels, not for real

The old cliché says that middle-aged men buy expensive sports cars in order to get sex. So, in a way, perhaps Spitzer was just cutting out the middleman.

Of course, everything about the Spitzer sex scandal boggles the mind: The original chastity of his reputation; the salaciousness of the details connected to his disgrace; the height of his fall; the magnitude of the humiliation and embarrassment invoked when being the highest elected official in one’s state means having to tell your wife of twenty years—the mother of your three teenage daughters—that you’ve cheated on her with prostitutes—most recently the day before Valentine’s Day—and that, in mere hours, this fact is going to be on every newspaper cover and TV news program she’s ever seen and known by every living person she’s ever met.

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Stand by your man: Silda Wall Spitzer and the cheating governor

When politicians cheat on their wives, why, as they give their public confessions, do their wives stand next to them at the podium?

Joe Garofoli’s San Francisco Chronicle piece, “Why do political wives stand by their men?”, asks this great, little-asked question:

Part political theater, part open-air therapy, these excruciating public confessionals demand three things of the spouse: to hold her family together at a moment of crisis; to support the person she supposedly loves; and to provide a least a shred of future political viability for her man.

But some analysts wonder if these humiliating productions have outlived their political usefulness.

“They have put these women through so much already – it just seems to be a second level of humiliation,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “It is supposed to make him look like not such a bad guy. Like, ‘Geez, look, his wife was standing next to him.’ But in this case, she looked so pained that, to me, he looked less sympathetic.”

Also in the SF Chronicle, Debra J. Saunders (“The emperor’s wife”) reasonably asks

If we have to see the wife, couldn’t it be as she is throwing his suits, socks and golf clubs on the sidewalk while invoking the name of a ruthless divorce attorney?

It would certianly make better television. Watching Silda Wall Spitzer, all I could think was that she looked like she probably felt: That she’d been socked in the gut. (Reportedly, she’d learned of the scandal the day before.) She didn’t even have Dina McGreevey’s odd little frozen smile.

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Check out the Huffington Post‘s article, Emperors Club: All About Eliot Spitzer’s Alleged Prostitution Ring. (You can click on the pic, also.)

Is it just me, or are these pictures, like the one at right, kinda creepy?

Is there an odd kind of deathliness to this whole thing: To ordering women with no heads, seated in kind of fake-artsy poses, so that you can have sex with them?

I’m almost religiously unmoved by political advertising, which, I’m sure like, many, I usually find boring beyond rote; usually no more than talking points with pictures.

However, when I saw this 2006 campaign ad during Eliot Spitzer’s run for governor of New York State, it almost took my breath away.

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Oh, for the good old days, when the only pot shots Barack Obama had to worry about were people criticizing him for sucking down a few sticks of Chocolate Thai…brilliant stuff from Michael Stevens, the brain behind CamPain 2008.

Hey: What is Barack Obama’s drug policy, anyway?

“Yes We Can” is the Barack Obama-affirming musical short by Black Eyed Peas front man and producer “Will.i.am” Adams Jr. It’s peopled by minor celebrities, and Scarlett Johansson, sing-songing an insignificant melody to text and footage from Obama’s January 8, 2008 New Hampshire primary victory speech. As I post this, it’s been viewed 5,460,140 times at its main YouTube location.

Make that 5,460,140.5 times: I only got halfway through it before I just couldn’t take any more.

Pourquoi? I think it’s more than the film’s bloated, black & white solemnity and manufactured earnestness, both, perhaps, best signified by an otherwise throwaway gesture at the 0:06 mark: Will.I.Am “offhandedly” “fixing” a lapel pin that appears to be just fine. (These despicable qualities are also on display in the newer, “We Are The Ones” video, as is another starlet, Jessica Alba.) Indeed, to really put one’s hand on what the problem is, one has to briefly go back to the recorded origins of the Black Eyed Peas in the 1990s.

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