You’ve got to hand it to Fox News.
Even though their Golden Boy, Huggy Bear, already is on the ropes, and their Golden Party faces an historic, crushing defeat at all levels in November, they’re still trying to find chinks in Barack Obama’s seemingly impenetrable electoral armor. This time, they’re suggesting that maybe Obama is too cool to be president.
Oh, and who’s their expert on coolness? Former MTV VJ Kennedy (right).
But cool won’t matter so much this year, said … Kennedy, now a talk show host for KFI AM radio in Los Angeles. Kennedy said voters have learned from the past.
“People credit Bill Clinton playing the saxophone … with helping him win in ’92 by drawing in a young audience who went and told their parents about it,” she said. “Now it’s 16 years later, and those people have kids and they’ve been through what a cool president can get you. It’s not really worth it.”
[…]
Former “Survivor: China” contestant Mike “Frosti” Zernow, a 21-year-old who identifies himself as a Democrat, might be exactly the kind of voter swayed by the coolness factor.
“When Will.i.am makes a music video about you with a bunch of celebrities and you’ve got videos up on MySpace and everything, I know it sounds dumb, but it does have an effect on me,” Zernow said. “People my age notice when a celebrity we like, like Scarlett Johansson, supports a particular candidate.”
But Kennedy said voters like Zernow are unlikely to come to the polls in November.
“Barack Obama is the most implicitly cool presidential candidate we’ve ever had,” Kennedy said. “It’s part of his mystique, but that’s not going to matter to people that actually vote. People that like to say they’re going to vote, they’ll be drawn in by that, but they never actually [vote]. So aside from a very small bump that he might receive from people under 25, no one is going to vote on coolness.”
Okay, first of all, Kennedy is a wingnut? Yeah, she is, complete with a pink GOP elephant tattoo. Go figure.
And secondly, when did she become the arbiter of cool? And how does she know how many young people will go to the polls this year? Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats brought record turnouts to nearly every primary, and the biggest increase was among the youngest voters. They see something that apparently Kennedy doesn’t: a country that is in the crapper thanks to failed GOP policies over the last fifteen years, and they don’t want to spend their late teens and early 20s watching the country disintegrate further — like my generation did with Reagan and Bush 41.
Young people are voting, Kennedy, more than ever before. And whether they’re voting for Obama because he’s “cool” or because they believe his leadership will bring a new, fresh perspective into Washington doesn’t really matter. The fact is, they’re voting for Obama. And your guy — your party — is going to be marginalized just as they so richly deserve.
Oh, and Kennedy? We might have gone through eight years of a “cool” president, but we’ve also seen almost eight years of a stupid, dry-drunk, warmongering, lying president. Given that choice (and, in large part, I believe we have that choice in 2008), I’ll take the “cool” president every time.
Blast Off! in exile 