Dead Tree Alert: The C Word

My current column in Time looks at the cultural battle in the Presidential campaign—over who is a "celebrity"—and asks:

Why, after all, is celebrity an insult? Personal magnetism, the ability to galvanize attention and rally masses: this is a bad quality in a Chief Executive? J.F.K. and Ronald Reagan managed to soldier on with this handicap. Besides, celebrity is America's chief international export. There's something almost unpatriotic about denigrating it; it's like insulting Obama by comparing him to a GMC truck. (You know who complains about American celebrity culture? Al-Qaeda and the French, that's who!)

Speaking of all this, there's yet another McCain "celebrity" ad today. Apparently the McCain camp thinks the strategy is working, although from my layman's following of the numbers that's arguable at best. Obama got a modest poll bump after his campaign trip, dropped somewhat after, but if you pull back from the day to day and look at the past few weeks since the first celeb ad launched, the numbers are more or less where they've been all summer. Likewise with other measures, such as Rasmussen's polling on both candidates' favorables/unfavorables.

The attacks might work in the long term, in the way that any sustained negative campaigning might. But I think that (1) as I've said before, the media has come to ascribe an almost magical power to negative ads, to the point where we assume they will always work simply because they're negative, and (2) I wouldn't assume so quickly that Americans have such universal contempt for celebrity, period.

A lot has been made of how the McCain "celebrity" attack is an example of the Karl Rove strategy of trying to turn your opponent's strength into weakness. Which I'm sure is true, but I think that there's another aspect of that strategy: to make your opponent afraid of his own strengths, hesitant to be himself. I'm not a political consultant, but if I were, I'd tell the Obama campaign not to try to make their candidate wonkier, less showy—smaller—in some effort to try to avoid the C word.

After all, celebrity may be a pejorative to some people—use another word, like "charisma," if you prefer—but it's still a powerful force. Yes, used one way it can imply that a candidate is merely a celebrity; but used another way (as Reagan did as a politician, or as Bono does as an artist-activist), it's a force multiplier.

The question is how you frame it: as I write in the column, Obama is obviously trying to define celebrity in the positive, mainstream-friendly People magazine sense, while the McCain ads are essentially the campaign equivalent of TMZ.