This weekend, the Obama Reelection Campaign released two new ads featuring celebrities Sarah Jessica Parker and Anna Wintour which received no shortage of commentary.
The folks at MSNBC questioned the timing of the ad in light of the dismal jobs report released on Friday which showed that only 69,000 jobs were added in May to the United States and that the unemployment rate rose from 8.1 percent to 8.2 percent. They justified the ill timing, however, with the fact that fundraising is a necessary part of campaigning which doesn’t always occur at opportune times.
On the Andrea Mitchell Report, Mitchell met with USA Today’s Susan Page and The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus to discuss the ads. Mitchell qualified that she thinks “Anna Wintour is brilliant and a wonderful person” and that she “love[s] Sarah Jessica Parker in all fashions,” but questioned whether this is “the way to run a campaign—especially given the jobs number.”
Page replied that it was “a sign that they really think they need to focus on raising money,” especially because “the Republicans are going to have the [fundraising] advantage.”
Marcus agreed, stating that “it is a truism of politics that you need to spend time fundraising,” but admitted that she had “flashbacks…to the famous McCain-Obama celebrity ad.”
The members of Morning Joe were slightly more critical of Anna Wintour’s ad than of that of Sarah Jessica Parker. Their reactions to Anna Wintour’s ad were as follows:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: The timing may have been a little off, just a smidge
WILLIE GEIST: ‘Come hang out with the high society, with the 1 percent on the upper-east side’? Maybe not the message we’re going for.
After Sarah Jessica Parker’s ad, they were able to rationalize the release of the ad with the requirement to fundraise.
SCARBOROUGH: She’s a good spokesperson.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: She is. Does that help? Does that do something?
GEIST: Well, I mean it raises money.
SCARBOROUGH: Though, that coming out on Friday, I guess, again, maybe the timing I don’t know.
GEIST: They’re just, they’re fundraisers
SCARBOROUGH: It happens!
GEIST: They always happen all over the place.
The people over at Fox News were far less convinced of the success of this celebrity ad campaign. Andrea Tantoros saw the ads as “a dual purpose play” for the youth vote and the women’s vote with which she believes the Obama campaign is “having big trouble.”
Greg Gutfeld was unimpressed with the choice of Anna Wintour, “an incredibly elitist, remote woman who looks down on everything.” He found this socialite an unconvincing figure to “come out and tell us how to vote” when “we’ve got problems with this economy [and] everybody’s hurting.”
Tantoros was also critical of the choice of Wintour, arguing that the target audience of teenagers “doesn’t read Vogue magazine” and “can’t even afford one of her shoes.”
The liberal media makes it seem as though the Obama Campaign could not have possibly predicted that the new political ads would coincide with the jobs report which indicated our country experienced the lowest amount of job creation in a year. However, one would hope that the leader of our nation would have some idea of its economic state.
Furthermore, relying on the opinions of celebrities only strengthens the criticism that Obama is a “celebrity president.” Plastering his likeness on Hope posters, hanging out in bars with university students, and palling around with Anna Wintour. We are a far cry away from the days of George Washington who snuck into towns to avoid all manner of pomp and circumstance.