I'd Guess Many People Have Ended Up Regretting Their First Time If It Was 2008

I'd comment on the latest Obama campaign ad, but I'll leave it to Allahpundit to sum up my thoughts...

Worth watching if only as fodder for a thought experiment on how a similar ad would be received if it came from the right. Light-hearted or no, it would bring about the “war on women” End Times, a days-long tribulation of fake-outrage oneupsmanship culminating in a moronic, pandering series of tweets from The One himself. Isn’t it just like a wingnut to sexualize the right to vote that women fought so hard for? Do they think women are too stupid to appreciate a straightforward pitch on the issues? Why can’t they be more sensitive, like Barack Obama?

We are of course talking about the following, which apparently mimics an ad used by Vlad Putin...



The fact that I had to look up Lena Dunham tells you that I'm pretty out of touch with pop culture, but there are times when that makes me happy.  Love this paragraph from her Wiki bio:

Dunham was born in New York City.^[2] Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter of "overtly sexualised pop art", and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is a photographer and designer who creates "disquieting domestic tableaux" with dolls.^[3][4] Dunham's father is Protestant, and according to Dunham, a Mayflower descendant;^[5][6] Dunham's mother is Jewish.^[7][8] She has a younger sister, Grace, who is a model and student at Brown University and who starred in Dunham's first film Tiny Furniture.^[9] As children, both Lena and Grace were babysat by photographers Sherri Zuckerman and Catherine McGann.

Her background is something that could only emerge here in America -- Protestant father, Jewish mother, parents with niche artistic careers, famous babysitters, etc.  And I give her credit for building a wildly successful career, and she's entitled to her beliefs.  But I'd venture to guess that far fewer people will be able to accomplish their dreams in this country if we continue following the economic policies of the candidate she's promoting in this ad. As for the ad, Ace of Spades is a little more biting...

It's not funny, it's not cute, and it's not persuasive, unless you think the important issues in this campaign are Binders Full of Birth Control.

It underlines the essential triviality of Obama and his Government Client & Upper Upper Class White Voter agenda. There is nothing to his campaign except very small social-progressive appeals to people who are simply not affected by the economy, whether they are too poor to notice a bad economy, immunized from the economy by being a government worker, or so rich they have nothing at all to fear from a bad economy.

It continues to be weird that Democrats want so bad to have sex with their cult leader. But I guess that's a central part of the cult thing.

I don't know if I find it that weird -- it strikes me more as beneath the office of the presidency, for whatever that's still worth (to be fair, many ads probably fit this standard).  If Dunham cuts this ad on her own as an enthused Obama supporter, that's fine; to have the campaign put its push behind it is disquieting to say the least, and that's before you get through the superficiality of it and long before you get to the sexist implications noted by Allahpundit.  Atlanticwire has this weird defense of it, which focuses more on their belief that the conservative outrage is silly, noting that it's intended to reach younger voters.  That's great and all, but that's not really the point -- if the ad featured Mitt Romney as a horror movie villian trying to kill young girls, that might be funny and reach young people, but it would still be tasteless and should be beneath the campaign.  of course, now I've gone and given the Obama campaign an idea...