McCain to Do Conan

NBC

Word is in from NBC that John McCain will appear on Late Night with Conan O'Brien on Friday, July 18. It'll be his first appearance there, according to the network, since 2005.

I've been working on a future column having to do with pop culture and the candidates, and one side issue I've been wrestling with is: why is Barack Obama so much more the focus of pop culture in this election, anyway? (Here I mean not just the candidates' use of pop culture, like talk shows and SNL, but pop culture's use of them: the online videos, the soft-magazine covers, the HOPE posters and their various mashups, the websites like barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com.)

I mean, by the traditional standard—where "traditional" = the last couple of decades — McCain is arguably the "better" pop-culture candidate: he's chattier and more game on late-night and funnier on shows like SNL, he likes The Office, which more people watch than Obama's favorite show, The Wire, and so on. Obama's done Access Hollywood and sends his pop-culture signals more obliquely—the Jay-Z "brush it off your shoulders" gesture, etc.—but in some ways he's more diffident toward pop culture personally. The big cultural spashes have tended to be done for or about the candidate (Obama Girl, the 1984 video) than by the candidate (he hasn't had a sax-on-Arsenio or bozers boxers-vs.-briefs moment as Bill Clinton was wont to). Arguably, his campaign's greatest stroke was not in entertainment culture but in consumer culture—branding the candidate like Nike or Target with its simple, memorable and ubiquitous O logo.

I don't have an answer; or rather, I have tons, probably the same ones you do. Obama's the newer face, pop culture is driven by young people, Hollywood loves Democrats, Lil' Wayne is more interesting now than The Beach Boys, etc. And yes, I haven't forgotten the mainstream-media-swooning-for-Barack angle (says the guy who constantly discloses that he voted for Obama). But if we're being honest, the non-MSM is all over Obama too; a Nielsen study I got the other day, for instance, found that Obama is the subject of twice as many online discussions as McCain.

(As for the liberal-Hollywood angle, there's still something qualitatively different between Springsteen singing for John Kerry and Yes We Can. Entertainers wanted to beat Bush, but nobody iconized his opponent as Obama has been—can you imagine the Che-style hagiographic image of Kerry?)

Part of it may be that things have changed since Bill Clinton went on Arsenio, and that the pop-culture political war (to the extent it matters, but it matters to some extent) is fought on different fronts now, and the late-night shows and their ilk don't dominate the buzz the way they did in 1992. But if you still care about them, here's one more appearance to mark on your calendar.