Britney, Paris and their fellow celebrity

Swiftboat, anyone?

In an unusual campaign spot released today, Team McCain dubbed Obama "the biggest celebrity in the world" and cast him alongside fleeting images of Spears and Hilton.

Most of the ad is given over to shots of the huge, adoring throng that turned out to see Obama during his recent visit to Berlin, Germany - hardly the kind of image that an opponent would normally highlight.

Aides to McCain agreed the ad was a tacit acknowledgment of Obama's popularity and ability to draw huge crowds - something McCain has struggled to do. But rather than fight Obama's celebrity status, they added, they are now trying to use it to make a larger point about his general lack of experience.

Weird

A Lowbrow in High Office Ruffles France

Curious item. In the US the movie crowd spells glamor; not so in France.
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to Carla Bruni and the appointment of a culture minister who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak, have combined to produce something of a culture shock.
France is, or sees itself as being, different. Certainly different than the US, on which the elite look down. Maybe more than the elite think of Americans as provincial bumpkins.

Nicolas Sarkozy has drawn criticism for his cultural tastes since he became president of France.

Crude and provincial, they say.

“Sarko l’Américain” is another common insult. The French, though, may soon have to think up a fresh one if (and you can almost hear Mitterrand starting to turn in his grave) the United States elects a president who delivers speeches like the one Senator Barack Obama gave on race while this country has its first modern leader not to have graduated from the country’s upper-crust schools, a head of state who on a recent visit to the Vatican arrived late, with an exceptionally crude French stand-up comic named Jean-Marie Bigard in tow. The coup de grâce: the hyperactive Mr. Sarkozy reportedly text-messaged somebody or other while with the pope.

This next line is really telling: “Look, we need a president who is cultivated,” he said, as if for a Frenchman this were as indisputable as the superiority of Pétrus. “It goes back to the days of the kings.”