Thursday, October 30, 2008
The Obama Infomercial
No, your Curmudgeon didn't watch it; political self-hype makes him bilious. But among those who did, and who weren't already committed to Obama's support, the reactions seem to have been preponderantly negative.
The city of Philadelphia, whose long-awaited triumph in the World Series was delayed by half an hour by Obama's recital, will probably never forgive him. Fans of Bones, the Emily Deschanel / David Boreanaz TV series about a forensic anthropologist and her FBI partner, which was displaced by the infomercial, are pretty pissed at him, too. And of course America's legion of Joe the Plumber admirers, whose figurehead has already suffered a loss of privacy and quite a few smears for having dared to ask Obama a simple question, seethed over Obama's flagrant flexure of his money muscles; those who watched were mostly interested in seeing whether he'd commit another disclosure of his anti-American convictions.
Withal, the infomercial, if it was intended to sway undecided or weak McCain supporters to Obama's ranks, probably did him more harm than good. Concerning this, there's an interesting historical precedent.
During the 1988 Presidential campaign, Lyndon LaRouche purchased half an hour of national network television time to promote his own, rather quixotic campaign. You might say, albeit facetiously, that LaRouche did achieve public office...if a cell in a federal prison can be called an office. In December 1988 he was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment for mail fraud and tax violations, of which he served about five years.
Would anyone else like to test the infomercial waters?
