You’re Barack Obama.
It’s less than two weeks before the election, and your competition Mitt Romney
is overtaking you. As with your first election, you depend heavily on new young
voters, because grownups know you’re a bull****ter (as you projected onto
Romney in your Rolling Stone interview), so you need to send out a compelling message that wins them over in
this final stretch of the race. What do you do? Why naturally, you approve a stunningly
ridiculous political message featuring a vapid young woman comparing voting for
you to having sex with you.
If you haven’t heard
of Lena Dunham before, it’s because you’re not obsessed with the degrading hookup
culture among today’s young people as depicted in HBO’s series Girls, a sort of poor woman’s Sex and the City. Dunham, 26, is the
creator, writer, and star of the show, which has made her such an icon of her lost
generation that her upcoming memoir of sexual experiences just netted a $3.7 million advance from Random House.
The Obama campaign
released a one-minute video last week featuring Dunham encouraging first-time voters to take the
plunge, speaking intimately to the camera as if giving advice to a teenager or fellow
twenty-something female about losing her virginity. You read that right. You
have to see this video to believe it – and even then, you might not. As Kevin Eder at Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center put it, “I’ve now watched it
four times. I refuse to believe that it’s a real, actual thing.”
It is a real, actual
thing. It is the Obama campaign hitting a new, simultaneously desperate and
contemptuous (and contemptible) low.
The video is full of
“Huh?” moments like that, such as “You want to do it with a guy who brought the
troops out of Iraq.” Huh? The troops left Iraq on a timeline established by
George W. Bush. Obama is not responsible for “bringing the troops out of Iraq”
any more than he is for killing Osama bin Laden.
Dunham rambles on: You should do it with “a guy who cares about whether you get health insurance, and specifically whether you get birth control. The consequences are huge.” Huh? The consequences of not having your birth control paid for by the taxpayers are “huge”? Seriously? This is what Obama’s young supporters are concerned about? Under him, our economy is plunging off a cliff. Unemployment and energy prices have skyrocketed. Businesses are leaving the country. Our foreign policy is in shambles. The country is more divided racially than at any time since the ‘60s. So many Muslim Brotherhood members are passing in and out of the White House, it’s like Grand Central Station. And this woman is horrified that a Romney win will mean she has to pay for her own birth control?
Dunham moves on to address what she apparently believes is another issue of critical importance: gay marriage. Don’t vote, she says, for a guy “who thinks that gay people should never have beautiful, complicated weddings of the kind we see on Bravo or TLC all the time.” The silliness of that comment aside, is she oblivious to the fact that the cynical Obama was opposed to gay marriage until his reelection campaign began and he decided it was politically convenient to claim that he had “evolved”?
Dunham rambles on: You should do it with “a guy who cares about whether you get health insurance, and specifically whether you get birth control. The consequences are huge.” Huh? The consequences of not having your birth control paid for by the taxpayers are “huge”? Seriously? This is what Obama’s young supporters are concerned about? Under him, our economy is plunging off a cliff. Unemployment and energy prices have skyrocketed. Businesses are leaving the country. Our foreign policy is in shambles. The country is more divided racially than at any time since the ‘60s. So many Muslim Brotherhood members are passing in and out of the White House, it’s like Grand Central Station. And this woman is horrified that a Romney win will mean she has to pay for her own birth control?
Dunham moves on to address what she apparently believes is another issue of critical importance: gay marriage. Don’t vote, she says, for a guy “who thinks that gay people should never have beautiful, complicated weddings of the kind we see on Bravo or TLC all the time.” The silliness of that comment aside, is she oblivious to the fact that the cynical Obama was opposed to gay marriage until his reelection campaign began and he decided it was politically convenient to claim that he had “evolved”?
Dunham’s not done
yet: “It’s a fun game to say, ‘Who are you voting for?’ and they say ‘I don’t
want to tell you!’ And you say, ‘No, who are you voting for?’ And they go,
‘Guess!’” This is just beyond embarrassing.
“Also,” Dunham continues, in case you didn’t have the stomach to keep watching, “it’s super uncool to be out and about and someone says, ‘Did you vote,’ and ‘No, I didn’t vote, I wasn’t ready.’” So she’s using peer pressure to get her generation to vote for Obama by telling them it’s uncool not to – like being a virgin. “My first time voting was amazing,” she says. “It was this line in the sand: Before I was a girl. Now I was a woman.” That’s doubtful, considering her juvenile presentation.
“Also,” Dunham continues, in case you didn’t have the stomach to keep watching, “it’s super uncool to be out and about and someone says, ‘Did you vote,’ and ‘No, I didn’t vote, I wasn’t ready.’” So she’s using peer pressure to get her generation to vote for Obama by telling them it’s uncool not to – like being a virgin. “My first time voting was amazing,” she says. “It was this line in the sand: Before I was a girl. Now I was a woman.” That’s doubtful, considering her juvenile presentation.
Parodies of the ad sprang up online almost immediately, most
notably Steven Crowder’s disturbingly good one here,
although the Dunham ad is already a parody of itself. Remember, this isn’t the usual pro-Obama celebrity video like one from the
perpetually unfunny Sarah Silverman or something slapped together for the comedy
website “Funny or Die”; this is a
political advertisement authorized by the Obama campaign itself. This is
how Obama believes he can and should appeal to young Americans.
National Review Online’s
Jim Geraghty compiled
some flabbergasted responses of conservative bloggers. Biased Girl
wonders, “Is that what this administration thinks Real women are like?” Stacy
Washington tweeted, “The #MyFirstTime ad is the height of vulgarity. Tell
me #Democrat Moms: Is this how you want the president talking to your
daughters?” Moe
Lane wrote, “I know I’m supposed to be shocked… but instead I’m embarrassed.”
NY Dem49
has a word of advice for Obama: “Don’t create an ad you wouldn’t be comfortable
with your daughter reciting.” Ace from Ace of Spades nails it:
It’s hideous. 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 continues to be weird that
Democrats want so bad to have sex with their cult leader.
What this silly
travesty of a political ad says is, Obama doesn’t respect young American women
at all. He thinks, or hopes, that they’re too ignorant and self-absorbed to
understand what the real issues are and to care about them, and that they can
be lured to the voting booth with this sleazy trivialization of the
voting process and of the state of our union.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 10/30/12)
