The McCain Hilton War

by Alex Rieneck

It was pretty funny. John McCain opened his big fat mouth and put his foot in it. Then Paris Hilton rolled up and tripped him into the rose bushes. It sounds like a cartoon skit, but it really happened, well, figuratively, anyway.

Last week John McCain’s campaign ran a TV commercial that compared Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. The idea was pretty simple, and it seemed safe enough. Barack Obama was really popular but he hadn’t been around for long and that made him seem like a lightweight. And if he was a lightweight... enter McCain’s advertisement. Watch Now

There were problems though and tactically, the first one was a doozy, the kind of mistake which made people wonder whether McCain was capable of running a chip shop, let alone a country. It was simple. Paris Hilton’s mother had donated $4600 to the McCain campaign, and Kathy Hilton isn’t the kind of person to sit idle at the idea of donating money to the campaign of someone who returns the favour by ridiculing her daughter. Kathy Hilton drew blood. She made the McCain campaign look both heartless and incompetent, and she did it with the precision of surgeon.

Then things got worse. Paris Hilton made her own video. The idea was simple. If McCain was going to have a go at her, she’d have a go back. After all, in this modern world YouTube is free and “response” videos have become a boring staple of the diet “Tube” generation. Paris’s video was different. Where the mother went for the jugular, Paris went for tasteful ridicule. McCain was an “old guy” the kind of guy who could remember when beer was “sold by the bucket” and “from the olden days”... all images the McCain campaign had been trying hard to dispel in the face of the onslaught of the comparatively youthful Obama. Needless to say the media picked up this new video with real fervour and gave it much airplay. As far as McCain was concerned, things had gotten much worse. Watch Now

The thing was, in this new Paris Hilton video Ms Hilton made sense. Real, political, sense. She stated clearly by inference that older people were closing younger people out of the political debate and then went on to meld the cornerstones of both Obama and McCain’s energy policies into a new idea that appears to make more sense than either of their theories. There was no way that anyone under the age of thirty was not going to respond to Paris Hilton’s political message, and because Paris happily sent herself up at the same time that she was roasting McCain over a slow fire there was no way that the video could be played without Paris message getting across. Simply, there was no way that it could be used against her. The damage was done, in the up to the minute world of TV and the corporate news, McCain was bleeding from a nasty scratching.

Enter the rearguard action. In the old days a bad ad would simply be pulled by the networks. If you’d seen it, you could describe it to people who had missed it, and that was it. It was a situation that lent itself to clear comparison with George Orwell’s “1984” where “he who controlled the present controlled the past, and he who controlled the past, controlled the future” the networks controlled the information, and the means of information dissemination and therefore the networks controlled the debate. Then the video tape came along. The “bad ad” could be recorded, but the recording could not be broadcast... until YouTube. Today, most of the “young crowd” (as opposed to those of us who can remember buckets full of beer) get a big percentage of ALL their TV via youTube and places like YouTube. After all, what young person in their right mind wants to time their life around a TV schedule? And nowadays a “bad ad” can hang around YouTube forever, endlessly doing damage like some kind of slow acting cancer in the public debate. A “bad ad” or a verbal misstep can come to define a candidate. In order to “deal with” Paris Hilton’s tape, YouTube itself would have to be dealt with. And it was.

Within twenty-four hours of Paris’ response to McCain the “parodies” were appearing on YouTube. The format was consistent. The original video vision from Paris’ tape would have the audio replaced by someone speaking in a silly voice. “Paris” would now say stupid things. The idea was simple, anyone searching for the original video would now find themselves in a swamps worth of other films with the same title, all pushing the barrow in a different direction. There were original McCain ads that had nothing to do with Paris Hilton that now suddenly had “Paris Hilton” in the title. Where once there was one video, and that video spawned another one, now the videos were spawning faster than maggots in a corpse. Now there were hundreds of videos. if they continue to multiply at the same rate, there will soon be thousands.

Searching YouTube today with the term “paris hilton barack obama” returns 713 hits. The term “paris hilton john mccain” returns 713 hits, and “paris hilton campaign ad” returns 1,750 including links to some fat guy in drag desperately engaged in attempting to subvert the electoral debate with his unique understanding of humour. Simply searching for “Paris Hilton” returns 112,000 hits which include the above stuff, and Paris biggest video on YouTube the filmclip of “Nothing in this World” which to date has over eight million hits and is the one of the top ten most watched clips ever on YouTube. By comparison, simply searching for “John McCain” returns only 56,000 hits (including some of the above mentioned). The most popular “John McCain” clip is “John McCain’s YouTube problem just became a Nightmare”. It is anything but flattering. To date it has only managed 3.4 million hits.

That is, at this time the state of play. John McCain attempted to attach himself to and benefit from Paris Hilton’s fame, and he sadly misjudged the lady and her ability to take use the Internet to fight back. People sympathetic to his campaign then fought a rearguard action against YouTube and sufficiently muddied the water that anyone searching for Paris Hilton’s response to his ad would, at the very least, be ‘reminded” that Ms Hilton was a “bimbo”, “a slut” and all the rest of it, and by inference, could safely be ignored.

All in the face of quite overwhelming and clearly obvious proof that, on YouTube at least, John McCain is far more likely to be ignored than Paris Hilton, and that that is a fact that probably still applies even in the increasingly unlikely event that John McCain ever become President. If this controversy proves anything it is that the Net is the home of the young, and wrinkly old guys go there and attempt to be “with it” at their peril.

Alex Rieneck
Alex Rieneck is the Gleet Net’s special correspondent on Paris Hilton
©Gleet.net ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Links

McCain Campaign commercial

Paris Hilton’s YouTube response

The top YouTube hit for “McCain” (that actually features McCain)3,468,378 views
McCain's YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare

The top YouTube Hit for “Paris Hilton” (that actually is Paris Hilton) 8,534,750 views
Paris Hilton: Nothing