The creator of the viral Obama video that’s got everybody all excited defends his creation[ e.a. ]:

“This is the nuttiest thing in the freaking world,” he said. “It’s not propaganda. It’s not part of a campaign. There’s no corporation behind it – the record company couldn’t get involved. I did it on my own. The only thing behind it is the people. And that’s like, wow!”

Merriam-Webster defines “propaganda“:

2: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person

3: ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect

Your video is propaganda, fool. You need to work on your vocabulary.

Does it mean something that even the “Obama Girl” didn’t bother to vote?

On Tuesday night, City Room ran into Ms. Ettinger at an election-watching party in Greenwich Village and asked how things went at the polls.

“I didn’t get a chance to vote today because I’m not registered to vote in New York,” she said.

So where is Obama Girl registered to vote?
“New Jersey.”

Um, but didn’t New Jersey also hold a primary?

True. The problem, she explained, was that she was sick in New York City and was unable to get back across the Hudson River to the polls in Jersey City.

“I was in Arizona for the Super Bowl — every time I get in the airplane I get sick,” said Ms. Ettinger, who did manage to make it to the Svedka Fembot election returns party at Chinatown Brasserie at Lafayette and Great Jones streets.

Okay, maybe the Obama girl isn’t a good example of the flakiness factor evident in Obama’s supporters. But what about the very respectable Kevin Drum, who voted for Obama and then found himself hoping that Hillary would win [e.a.]?

And although Obama obviously made up a huge amount of ground over the past two weeks, what it felt like to me was disappointment. He seemed to be coming on so strong that it seemed inevitable he’d win one or two of the big Hillary states — or at least make them into close races — but he didn’t. In the end, Hillary won California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts by double digit margins. It really seemed to take a lot of wind out of the Obama surge.

The other thing inside my head that I didn’t expect was that as the results came in, I found myself sort of rooting for Hillary. Why? Buyer’s remorse? Rooting for the underdog? Guilt for having “betrayed” her by voting for Obama?

Outsize, overinflated expectations—like the insane hype created by the Obama campaign and its friends and supporters in the media—can easily lead to crushing disappointment (and even more voter apathy than the “hopeful” started out with).

I predict that young people will not be inspired to help “change” America. (For one thing: where would they go to effect that change? It’s not as if Obama has suggested, as JFK did, that his supporters actually give something of themselves to their country. So far, all the contributions have been to his campaign. What does that do to bring about “change” in America?

And that’s just one of the risks of running a vapid “inspirational” campaign. The other risk is that you’ll have much more battle-hardened and much less mushy folks, like, say, Jeff Jarvis and me (here and here and here and here, for example)—not to mention Bill Clinton—to remind you that Obama is selling snake oil:

His supporters, including many New York friends of mine, buy his image and believe he is less political and that he is indeed different. I think he’s more political and his campaign is the greatest example of the selling of the president I’ve yet seen. To state it harshly, I say that relying on these stock phrases — believing that we are going to swallow empty oratory about “change” punctuated with chants of “yes we can” — is a cynical political act.

But then again, I can’t argue with the fact that it’s working. It’s working with voters and it’s certainly working with the media, which have given Obama more attention through much of the campaign.

It worked for a while. But the media didn’t give the whole picture, as this picture posted by Ben Smith attests:

Note the many empty seats.

You won’t see this in most of the news photography, because photographers are packed into press risers, opposite whatever backdrop — a crowd, a flag — the campaign prefers.

But while Obama has held some very large rallies in some very small cities — 14,000 in Boise! — there have also been quite a few empty seats at some of the bigger venues.

Does it come as a surprise to you that the media and the campaigns worked together to create the impression of a “surge” for Obama? It shouldn’t.

I boldly predict no mo’ Mo for Barack Obama.

But I could be wrong … because hope springs eternal!

full disclosure: I voted for Bill Clinton twice, and for Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate, and for Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination yesterday. This despite the fact that I am no fan of the Clintons.

On the other hand, I don’t expect to be a fan of my president. I expect my president to work hard at the business of our nation so that I and my friends and family can go about our lives doing the things we like to do, and go to sleep at night knowing that a responsible person is overseeing the big, scary mess that is the United States of America.

You know that almost 50 people died yesterday as a result of the horrifying tornadoes that ripped through several states, right?

Well, here’s how Good Morning America started the day:

Set to Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” Diane Sawyer who, after anchoring five hours last night, told viewers, “This morning, the dream lives on.” After a mention of the storms in the show open, GMA spent the next 12 minutes talking politics. First with George Stephanopoulos then with Kate Snow (with Clinton campaign), David Wright (with Obama campaign), and Ron Claiborne (with McCain campaign). Next, Robin Roberts interviewed Mike Huckabee. The last question to Huckabee was about the tornadoes that affected his state and others. Sawyer then brought in Sam Champion who reported live from Atkins, AR.

I think I have accumulated enough evidence in two years of writing this blog to show that any TV executive who claims to broadcast something recognizable as “the news” is a big, fat liar.

Can it be any plainer than at CNN, a network that, when it began, was devoted entirely to news.—Now, its honchos are delighted to be able to bring you the liveliest entertainment that they can squeeze out of a given event.

As the exchange grew angrier, Sam Feist, the political director for CNN, said, “This can be the rest of the debate — that’s O.K.” … During the thrust-and-parry between the candidates, CNN’s cameras pulled back to show both men.

“Sit on it,” said Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN, who was in the control booth for both debates. “That’s the story, right here, the two of them.”

This was the “two-shot,” which has become the defining image of the recent televised debates. …

“Television traditionally shows the person asking the question, then cuts to the person answering,” Mr. Bohrman said later. “I’m a firm believer in watching the person to whom the question is being asked. I want to see them think.”

The producers made extensive use of the two-shot throughout the Democratic debate, but they mainly captured the candidates nodding in agreement with each other. Speaking to the moderator, Wolf Blitzer, through an earpiece at the halfway point of the debate, Mr. Bohrman suggested taking a tougher stance with the candidates.

“You have to become part of this, Wolf,” Mr. Bohrman advised. “If this was ‘Late Edition,’ ” Mr. Blitzer’s Sunday interview show, “you’d be having more of a conversation.”

I have no objection to horse-race coverage of elections, which are horse races. But have TV executives given up entirely on delivering hard information to their audiences?

And why am I—a lowly, pseudonymous blogger who watches the media as a mere hobby—the only person who seems to care about the news-free zone that is TV? Especially since there are so many organizations that purport to study the media?

While the entire media establishment was gorging last night on the circus that is Campaign ‘08, dozens of people lost their lives in terrible storms and there was almost no reporting about it:

Crews went door-to-door Wednesday searching debris for more victims of deadly tornadoes that ripped the roof off a shopping mall, pummeled mobile homes and blew apart warehouses as they tore across four states. At least 44 people were killed throughout the South.

The victims included 24 people in Tennessee, 13 in Arkansas, and seven in Kentucky, emergency officials said. Among those killed were Arkansas parents who died with their 11-year-old in Atkins, about 60 miles northwest of Little Rock. Hundreds more were injured.

Whither the “news”?

Regular readers know that I’m not a politico. Nevertheless, I’m ready to make a prediction (of sorts). I get the very strong feeling that America will not go for an unknown quantity come November.

From the heart of DemocratLand, over at TPM Cafe, here’s why:

Clinton deserves a huge amount of credit – especially from the press corps. Tonight should be a wake-up call: We need to take seriously that outside of those cutting very cool YouTube videos and packing unbelievably large rallies, there is a significant silent – at times – majority of working-class whites, Latinos, seniors, and women who like Hillary Clinton, and will vote for her. For Obama, he has upscale whites and African-Americans …

Even more devastatingly accurate is this from Jim Sleeper, also at TPM Cafe:

Obama is in trouble if too many of his famously small $20 and $30 contributions come … mainly from people like the up-and-coming young white writers and journalists with whom I watched one of the recent Democratic debates from the tony (but not too tony) New York neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.

Every time John Edwards mentioned broken workers in mills he’d known, the young crowd watching the debate hooted derisively, “The mill!, The mill!” Every time Hillary Clinton mentioned her 35 years of experience, they hooted, too.

Yep. The wiseasses at the back of the classroom—or in the leftosphere—will not put Barack Obama in the White House. More to the point, they probably would do nothing to help him realize the Democrats’ supposed dreams [e.a.]:

I fear that too many young whites with bright prospects have no really serious intention of redressing the growing inequities which the neoliberal world that employs them is spawning, not just between themselves and poor blacks on the Southside but, these days, between blacks and blacks, and women and women, let alone between cool young whites like themselves and the declasse, lumpy white and Latino workers all around them.

Not that my young friends defend wholeheartedly the system in which they’re prospering. To their credit, it makes them uncomfortable. But they grasp at mostly symbolic gestures of a politics of moral posturing that relieves racial and class guilt and steadies their moral self-regard with smallish contributions to Obama, an Ivy alum whom they trust to help those people on the Southside without dragging them too deeply into it; without reconfiguring how we charter our corporations and re-construe the private and public investments that employ upscale young whites and well-behaved non-whites; and certainly without redistributing their own bright prospects and future prerogatives and second homes.

This pretty much reflects the conversations I’ve had with my son, who happens to live in Brooklyn. What are you planning to do to help Obama’s agenda after he gets elected? I asked.

He had no answer. It never occurred to him that merely voting for Obama isn’t enough. In this, he’s like most Americans, who are not involved in public service.

I don’t blame my son for casting a symbolic vote. I blame Barack Obama, his campaign strategists, and his supporters—particularly Oprah Winfrey—for suggesting to a gullible public that voting for Obama is enough, an end in itself.

That is a huge load of smelly bullshit, and I know in my gut that in early-21st-century America, with the enormous raft of problems facing us, his campaign will not fly beyond the Precincts of Political Correctness.

He couldn’t even win Massachusetts after the Kennedy Coronation, not to
mention California.

Obama deployed powerhouse friends, including Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. A Sunday Los Angeles rally with Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and Kennedy’s niece, Maria Shriver, added high-profile female counterweight to Clinton.

“If Barack Obama was a state, he’d be California,” said Shriver, wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Kennedys have strong resonance in California.

Really? I have yet to see evidence of that. What I see is a lot of Kennedys who have expended their dwindling-to-nonexistent political capital on a mirage.

An election is for votes.
You can market celebrities to potential voters, but that doesn’t make them behave like consumers.

Did you hear that Sarah Silverman is f*cking Matt Damon?

Sassy!