Obama ‘Celeb’ ad - the race turns nasty

At some point in the last week the race to become the next President of the United States took a turn for the vicious. The John McCain camp reacted to Barack Obama’s recent spell abroad with a television ad which attempted to paint the Illinois senator as a celebrity-obsessed political lightweight. The ad, called Celeb, featured images of Obama alongside those of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton (pictured).

One of the first to criticise the ad was Kathy Hilton, mother of Paris and donor to the McCain campaign. "It is a complete waste of the money John McCain's contributors have donated to his campaign," she said.

Meanwhile Bob Herbert in the New York Times wrote that the Celeb ad had detectable undercurrents of racism. "Spare me any more drivel about the high-mindedness of John McCain", said Herbert. The ad features "two highly sexualised young women both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear" and is meant to convey a sense that Obama "is somehow presumptuous, too arrogant, too big for his britches - a man who obviously does not know his place… The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control."

Obama reacted to the ad with a typically understated response. "What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me," he said. "You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky."

The McCain campaign wasted no time in taking Obama’s comments and turning them against him. "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong," McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a written statement.

Was Obama’s response an attempt to paint McCain as a racist? The Washington Post’s Dan Balz tried to untangle the situation and determine who, if anybody, brought race into the campaign first: "Was it Barack Obama, who not so subtly pointed to John McCain and seemingly accused him of trying to scare voters by drawing attention to the fact that Obama doesn't look like (read: he is African American) all the other presidents? Or was it McCain's campaign, which cried foul over Obama's statements with such vehemence that race became the story of the day on all the networks, in all the papers and on all the blogs?"

Now that the campaign has turned nasty, wrote John Heilemann in New York magazine, Obama must make sure he doesn’t become just another victim of the Republican attack machine. "Get on offense, batter McCain for his gaffes and incoherence, hammer him for his flip-flops, highlight how his maverick status is a thing of the past, and turn him into a combination of Bush and Grandpa Simpson," suggests Heilemann.

FIRST POSTED AUGUST 5, 2008