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By Oketch Onyango
Nairobi, Kenya

Two centuries ago when a great man appeared, people looked for God’s purpose in him; today we look for his press agent”– Daniel Boorstin.

The Republican Party is currently loading the word “celebrity” with as much peskiness as possible to promote to conservative Middle America an alternative product that appeals to their instincts. “What consumers buy must reflect who they are and who they aspire to be in relation to how they perceive the world – with lightning-quick judgments of ‘real’ or ‘fake’ hanging in the balance,” writes Legendary business consultants James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II in their book – Authenticity. Hence the viral campaign ad lumping Democratic Party candidate Barrack Obama, together with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton – the pop tart and the hotel heiress, was meant to define celebrity as a sensational in-authentic product manufactured overnight in the consciousness of the masses by the wayward media.

This narrative constructs celebrity as a shimmering mass ornament transfixed in the glare of flush bulbs, huge arena events, glamour and rhetoric. This personality is a pseudo-event accessorized with inexperience, popularity, enlightenment and charisma – and in American lexicon, an empty suit made from the same dubious mold as used car salesmen, celluloid, paparazzi, supermarket tabloids, Miss Spears and Miss Hilton. The last two skewered in as props for idleness, orgiastic passion, chaos, excess, intuition and self destruction – the true exemplars of the repositories of Dionysian pleasure and exuberance.

The Republican picture book is hard at work to paint the celebrity and its perceived negligent absentee parents – the biased media establishment, as being out of touch with real Americans. And this narrative being executed with the natural ease of Tom Sawyer is to give traction to their implied narrative that the celebrity is not authentic or real enough to trust with the power of governing America.

Why, after all, asks James Poniewezik should celebrity be 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.

According to Gilmore and Pine, the virtualization of life – where friends aren’t friends unless you “confirm” them on Facebook and reporters are now all bloggers, and vice versa has led to a deep consumer yearning for the authentic. America has “toxic levels of in-authenticity.” Most of the e-mail we get is fake and it’s so difficult to reach a real person via an 800 number that we had to invent a heretofore unnecessary locution—real person—to describe the entity we are trying to reach. People live fake lives in Second Life. Corporate deceit reached epidemic levels after the dotcom bust. Depending on your politics, you might add that there were no WMD.

By agitating for a recall on product celebrity, the McCain team is sidling to peddle the other product they are promoting as rich in solid achievement, ordinary and has morphed into being in the consciousness of the people (as opposed to the masses) through time, folklore and feats of bravery. This one is supposedly guided by the Apollonian virtues of creative order, self control, individuality, clarity and perfection. He delivers on his promise and his word is code for honor to be seared into the hearts of the people as if by the burning eyes of John Wayne and Charlton Heston – two gnarled, scraggy jawed icons of American maverick cinematic mythology. This manifestation is authentic and appeals to our collective admiration through courage, nobility and exploits, and in his emergence Middle America should feel the mysterious hand of God. This one is the real thing in contrast to “the one.”

Modern campaigns say Jonathan Alter, are about flinging ten things against the wall every day and hoping something sticks. Everything else, from fund-raising to advertising, speechmaking to Web strategy, is in the service of applying that adhesive, either to cement the candidate’s message or muck up the opponent’s engine with sludge.

By trying to clog up Mr. Obama’s motor with the drudgeries of brand celebrity, the Republican repairmen hope to fan the stink of irresponsibility, immaturity and the out of touch label that has in the last few years bedeviled the lives of celebrities like Britney Spears, Mel Gibson and Richard Kramer. Through such innuendos they hope create the virus of doubt in the minds of voters about the gumption of product Obama as well as bog down their opponent by constant pit stops for muck extrication.

According to Jonathan Alter memorable lines, images, gaffes and monikers act like a piece of gum on the bottom of your shoe. They get your attention and may even shape your voting behavior. In the world of marketing, “sticky branding” means intentionally creating an emotional attachment to a consumer product and political campaigns often try to add gobs of glue.” Michael Grundwald says that the public – to whom the campaigns pander, share blame with the candidates, their consultants and the trivia obsessed media for this political race to the bottom of the barrel.

 The secret according to John Sterling, president and publisher of Henry Holt is to identify the constituency and then throw them some red meat. And that red meat is a mixture of conflicts, scandals, polls, debates, process and gaffes for this is what makes 24 hours of news.

Admittedly, the 2000 American presidential elections cleaved the country into red and blue zones and in the ensuing free for all, reporters and pundits scrambled to raise audience ratings by ratcheting up the noise level in an already super-heated and polarized national debate cemented constituencies. They reported and analyzed the elections in the military jargon of WWI trench warfare. Reporters were “on the ground” covering the “fighting in the trenches” or at “ground zero” in West Palm Beach. There was the supposedly “nuclear scenario” of the Florida legislature choosing its own set of electors, and the “political Armageddon” that loomed in the country’s future.

Dan Rather then of CBS News, was in his element, lathering in freely juggled metaphors and plutonium humor by referring to the election as a “nuclear meltdown.” The mainstream was arm wrestling the comic to deliver news and information at freeway speeds.

Tom Chandler, a guru on how to write copy for a billboard at 70 mph says;
“Writing billboards is tough. You’re delivering a sales message at freeway speeds, and you absolutely, positively must cut through the barrage of information coming at your reader – who’s trying to keep a ton of steel nicely centered between the lines. At freeway speeds, no one has the time to puzzle out your clever little pun, or unravel layers of meaning. But they need to remember your billboard for more than the second it takes to look at the next one. You need to hit them right between the eyes – but in a way that amuses, entertains, or delivers a big, big benefit.”

In venturing recklessly into the freeway, the McCain team still had one lesson to learn on authentic branding from an unlikely quarter. The Dionysian Miss Hilton struck back at 70 mph with a slick, nerdy video accessorizing Mr. McCain with Yoda and the undead from Tales from the crypt, giving Mr. McCain a crash course that in the free swing saloon fight of American presidential campaign – getting into a brawl with a bikini clad Paris Hilton does not make a John Wayne. Girls gone wild is not for the faint hearted.

The McCain camp had missed one clue of the American market place –“today you are authentic when you acknowledge just how fake you really are.”

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