The Literal Collision of Politics & Pop Culture

Politics and pop-culture often cross paths, or, when fund-raising is involved, run in similar circles. Rarely though do they collide in a way that affects the trajectory of either. All that changed this past week...when John McCain climbed down from The Straight Talk Express and into the mud and in doing so tempted the wrath...or rather the opportunism of Paris (no need to even mention the surname).

In a television ad that represented a whole new take on "scare tactics" and apparently aiming to provide clarity of choice in this year's Presidential race in terms sure to resonate with ALL Americans of high moral fortitude, the GOP nominee lumped Barack Obama together with Paris and Brittnay. The ad copy - "he's the biggest celebrity in the world but is he ready to lead?" was timed to coincide with Obama's multi-country overseas tour during which he drew adoring crowds in the thousands.

Paris just being Paris, wasted no time in leveraging the pathetic ploy of the "white haired dude" to further perpetuate her status as the preeminent practitioner of "famous for being famous" debuting a response ad online.

Yeah, yeah...entertaining, slightly shameful but I'm curious about what effect any of this had on to involved parties? Looking at the chart above, at least in the blogosphere, SHE saw an ~900% increase in blog post mentions from the time the McCain ad first ran to through when her ad was posted online. Since positive and negative mentions seem to have the same value for Paris, no other analysis is needed. For HIM on the other hand, he saw a 50% increase in blog post mentions from the time his ad first ran to through when Paris's ad was posted online. But unless you're a Hilton, a Spears or a Kayne West, that can't be the whole story - positive and negative effects matter.

If the McCain camp's strategy was to try to contrast him with his opponent in terms of age and experience, looking at the charts below, we see that McCain's effort may have backfired...while blog post mentions including the words "Barack Obama" + "young" increased ~50% during this sideshow, blog post mentions including the words "John McCain" and "old" increased ~86%.

"Old" and "young" do not automatically equate to "bad" and "good" but in the context of Presidential politics, I think we can assume that old = a negative. "Young" on the other hand is more subjective. Without looking at the context for each post, we can't know but for purposes of this analysis, let's consider "young" to be "less than ideal." So the McCain ploy generated an uptick in discourse around Obama's youth but a groundswell of discourse about McCain's oldness. But that's not the whole story either...let's look a little deeper...

If the aim of the McCain team was to increase the regard for McCain's experience and contrast that with Obama's ostensibly problematic inexperience, that doesn't seem to have worked out for them either as the chart below illustrates. During the period from when McCain's ad first ran through when Paris posted hers, there's almost no movement in the % of blog posts mentioning McCain's experience or Obama's inexperience.


At the end of the day, the whole episode, at least as viewed through the lens of the blogosphere seems to have created only negatives for McCain, for Obama, there was little impact and the real winner appears to be Paris. What a shock. Her % of blog mentions, while having subsided in the past couple of days, is still up 350% from before the McCain ad ran. She's got to be grateful to the "wrinkly old guy" for that!