Now we get it

Why would John McCain call Barack Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world” (emphasis on “biggest”), as if this was a bad thing in the eyes of people who can’t seem to ever get enough of the lives of the rich and famous?

Americans enjoy a steady diet of infotainment on the Web, in the paper and on the tube and hang on every new tidbit about celebrities like Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, J. Lo, Dr. Phil and Oprah Winfrey.

So wouldn’t a statement like that be political suicide for someone like McCain, who’s currently begging celebrities for money and attention?

If you were a little bit confused by what appeared to be a nod of approval from McCain to Obama’s rock star appeal, you weren’t alone. Most of the news outlets covering this bizarre, manipulative campaign ad didn’t make any of the potential historical connections either, and still haven’t.

That’s because they are pretending as hard as possible to not actually see the characters being connected by McCain to Obama — downwardly spiraling “bad girl” Britney Spears and the routinely drunk and really bad Paris Hilton — for what they really represent: Middle America’s blond, blue-eyed, corn-fed daughters. Good little white girls gone bad, capable of doing just about anything.

You see, what McCain was really doing was not so much linking Obama to Hollywood’s excesses.

Otherwise he would have used someone like Pitt or Oprah, who really is the biggest celebrity in the world, or Lopez, or Jolie. But he didn’t. He used Britney and Paris to feed into longstanding racial bigotries that not all that long ago often resulted in the lynching of young black men, just like Obama.

People of this generation probably don’t remember the time when it was socially unacceptable for African Americans to hold their eyes on white people they saw on the street. They may not know about the time when a black man could be strung up by a white mob for being caught merely looking sideways at a pretty white woman.

But even though voters under 30 may not know these tragic parts of our nation’s twisted psycho-sexual history, McCain and his handlers certainly do, just as the people they are actually trying to reach with those vile veiled messages understand what he’s really saying.

McCain’s people well know that their candidate’s strength — some say only hope — is in Middle America, Red States far away from Hollywood, where people are still mostly white, over 40 and are themselves looking on in disbelief as a black man now moves toward the nation’s highest seat
of power.

OK, let’s say we got it all wrong. We’ll allow for coincidental placements, like putting Obama in front of the biggest phallic symbol in the country — the Washington Monument — and then in front of some enormous obelisk somewhere in Germany. But what preceded those images? Stills of Brit and Paris, the former looking like she was up all night partying, the latter smiling coyly, as though she had just done or was about to do something morally objectionable. So what many Americans really saw was not so much entertainers for Obama — think of it: who really knows or cares who Paris and Britney want to win the election — but America’s prodigal daughters, now forever linked with that image of a confident black man who could very well seduce both of them, because he’s “the biggest celebrity in the world.”

The CIA could not have written a more racist psycho-ops scenario for the senator from Arizona. But who knows? Considering his lifelong ties with the military and intelligence communities, maybe they did.

Kathy Hilton, Paris’ mom, didn’t think too highly of what McCain did, considering she and her husband had just contributed $4,600 to his campaign. She didn’t touch on the sexual implications of it all, but she did call the ad a complete waste of time and money.

“And it is a completely frivolous way to choose the next president of the United States,” she wrote to the Huffington Post.

From our perspective, she might have also used words like racist, sleazy, prurient and insidious to better describe the thinking behind what actually happened here.

Or maybe Obama had it right all along. He called the ad and McCain cynical. To that we could not agree more.